finding on that account. "The Mountain of the Holy Cross," "The Groves Were God's First Temples," "The Cliffs of Green River," "The Children of the Mountain, The Ripening of the Leaf," and others have given him additional fame, and while they do not equal in grandeur the first mentioned, in many respects from an artistic standpoint they are superior. L and after leaving the executive chair he de- His TEPHEN DECATUR, a famous com STE ELAND STANFORD was one of the greatest men of the Pacific coast and also had a national reputation. He was born March 9, 1824, in Albany county, New York, and passed his early life on his father's farm. He attended the local schools of the county and at the age of twenty began the study of law. He entered the law office of Wheaton, Doolittle and Hadley, at Albany, in 1845, and a few years later he moved to Port Washington, | California. Wisconsin, where he practiced law four years with moderate success. In 1852 Mr. Stanford determined to push further west, and, accordingly went to California, where three of his brothers were established in business in the mining towns. They took Leland into partnership, giving him charge of a branch store at Michigan Bluff, in Placer county. There he, developed great business ability and four years later started a mercantile house of his own in San Francisco, which soon became one of the most substantial houses on the coast. On the formation of the Republican party he interested himself in politics, and in 1860 was sent as a delegate to the convention that nominated Abraham Abraham Lincoln. In the autumn of 1861 he was elected, by an immense majority, governor of California. Prior to his election as governor he had been chosen president of the newly-organized Central Pacific Railroad Company, 6 modore in the United States navy, was born in Maryland in 1779. He entered the naval service in 1798. In 1804, when the American vessel Philadelphia had been run aground and captured in the harbor of Tripoli, Decatur, at the head of a few men, boarded her and burned her in the face of the guns from the city defenses. For this daring deed he was made captain. He was given command of the frigate United States at the breaking out of the war of 1812, and in October of that year he captured the British frigate Macedonian, and was rewarded with a gold medal by congress. After the close of the war he was sent as commander of a fleet of ten vessels to chastise the dey of Algiers, who was preying upon American commerce with impunity and demanding tribute and ransom for the release of American citizens captured. Decatur captured a number of Algerian vessels, and compelled the dey to sue for peace. He was noted for his daring and intrepidity, and his coolness in the face of danger, and helped to bring the United States navy into favor with the people and congress as a means of defense and offense in time of war. He was killed in a duel by Commodore Barron, March 12, 1820. JAMES AMES KNOX POLK, the eleventh president of the United States, 1845 to 1849, was born November 2, 1795, in Mecklenburg county, North Carolina, and was the eldest child of a family of six sons. He removed with his father to the Valley of the Duck River, in Tennessee, in 1806. He attended the common schools and became very proficient in the lower branches of education, and supplemented this with a course in the Murfreesboro Academy, which he entered in 1813 and in the autumn of 1815 he became a student in the sophomore class of the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, and was graduated in 1818. He then spent a short time in recuperating his health and then proceeded to Nashville, Tennessee, where he took up the study of law in the office of Felix Grundy. After the completion of his law studies he was admitted to the bar and removed to Columbia, Maury county, Tennessee, and started in the active practice of his profession. Mr. Polk was a Jeffersonian • Republican" and in 1823 he was elected to the legislature of Tennessee. He was a strict constructionist and did not believe that the general government had the power to carry on internal improvements in the states, but deemed it important that it should have that power, and wanted the constitution amended to that effect. But later on he became But later on he became alarmed lest the general government might He become strong enough to abolish slavery and therefore gave his whole support to the "State's Rights" movement, and endeavored to check the centralization of power in the general government. Mr. Polk was chosen a member of congress in 1825, and held that office until 1839. He then withdrew, as he was the successful gubernatorial candidate of his state. He had become a man of great influence in the house, and, as the leader of the Jackson party in that body, weilded great influence in the election of General Jackson to the presidency. sustained the president in all his measures and still remained in the house after General Jackson had been succeeded by Martin Van Buren. He was speaker of the house during five sessions of congress. He was elected governor of Tennessee by a large majority and took the oath of office at Nashville, October 4, 1839. He was a candidate for re-election but was defeated by Governor Jones, the Whig candidate. In 1844 the most prominent question in the election was the annexation of Texas, and as Mr. Polk was the avowed champion of this cause he was nominated for president by the proslavery wing of the democratic party, was elected by a large majority, and was inaugurated March 4, 1845. President Polk formed a very able cabinet, consisting of James Buchanan, Robert J. Walker, William L. Marcy, George Bancroft, Cave Johnson, and John Y. Mason. The dispute regarding the Oregon boundary was settled. during his term of office and a new department was added to the list of cabinet positions, that of the Interior. sitions, that of the Interior. The low tariff nia and New Mexico. Mr. Polk retired from the presidency March 4, 1849, after having declined a re-nomination, and was succeeded by General Zachary Taylor, the hero of the Mexican war. Mr. Polk retired to private life, to his home in Nashville, where he died at the age of fifty-four on June 9, 1849. A NNA DICKINSON (Anna Elizabeth Dickinson), a noted lecturer and public speaker, was born at Philadelphia, October 28, 1842. Her parents were Quakers, and she was educated at the Friends' free schools in her native city. She early manifested an inclination toward elocution and public speaking, and when, at the age of 18, she found an opportunity to appear before a national assemblage for the discussion of woman's rights, she at once established her reputation as a public speaker. From 1860 to the close of the war and during the exciting period of reconstruction, she was one of the most noted and influential speakers before the American public, and her popularity was unequaled by that of any of her A few weeks after the defeat and death of Colonel Baker at Ball's Bluff, Anna Dickinson, lecturing in New York, made the remarkable assertion, "Not the incompetency of Colonel Baker, but the treachery of General McClellan caused the disaster at Ball's Bluff." She was hissed and hooted off the stage. A year later, at the same hall and with much the same class of auditors, she repeated the identical words, and the applause was so great and so long continued that it was impossible to go on with her lecture for more than half an hour. The change of sentiment had been wrought by the reverses and dismissal of McClellan and his ambition to succeed Mr. Lincoln as president. sex. Ten years after the close of the war, Anna than would fill a trunk. Never able to get into a magazine with a line. Care about it? Mad as thunder. Think about starting a magazine and rejecting everbody's articles except my own." except my own." Mr. Burdette was born at Greensborough, Pennsylvania, in 1844. He served through the war of the rebellion under General Banks on an excursion ticket" as he felicitously described it, "good both ways, conquering in one direction and running in the other, pay going on just the same." He entered into journalism by the gateway of New York correspondence for the "Peoria Transcript," and in 1874 went on the "Burlington Hawkeye" of which he became the managing editor, and the work that he did on this paper made both himself and the paper famous in the world of humor. Mr. Burdette married in 1870, and his wife, whom he called "Her Little Serene Highness, was to him a guiding light until the day of her death, and it was probably the unconscious pathos with which he described her in his work that broke the barriers that had kept him out of the maga |