 Collector's desk.
    There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and re-creating the
stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier, - the man of true and simple energy.
It was the recollection of those memorable words of his, - »I'll try, Sir!« -
spoken on the very verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, and breathing the
soul and spirit of New England hardihood, comprehending all perils, and
encountering all. If, in our country, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor,
this phrase - which it seems so easy to speak, but which only he, with such a
task of danger and glory before him, has ever spoken - would be the best and
fittest of all mottoes for the General's shield of arms.
    It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be
brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care
little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of
himself to appreciate. The accidents of my life have often afforded me this
advantage, but never with more fulness and variety than during my continuance in
office. There was one man, especially, the observation of whose character gave
me a new idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically those of a man of business;
prompt, acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through all perplexities, and
a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish, as by the waving of an
enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood in the Custom-House, it was his proper
field of activity; and the many intricacies of business, so harassing to the
interloper, presented themselves before him with the regularity of a perfectly
comprehended system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal of his class. He
was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself; or, at all events, the main-spring
that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like
this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and
convenience, and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the duty
to be performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in
them. Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so
did our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met
with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity, -
which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime, - would he
forthwith, by the merest touch of
