ELLSWORTH.

The beginnings of great periods have often been marked and made memorable by striking events.  Out of the cloud that hangs around the vague inceptions of revolutions, a startling incident will sometimes flash like lightning, to show that the warring elements have begun their work.  The scenes that attended the birth of American nationality formed a not inaccurate type of those that have opened the crusade for its perpetuation.  The consolidation of public sentiment which followed the magnificent defeat at Bunker’s Hill, in which the spirit of indignant resistance was tempered by the pathetic interest surrounding the fate of Warren, was but a foreshadowing of the instant rally to arms which followed the fall of the beleaguered fort in Charleston harbor, and of the intensity of tragic pathos which has been added to the stern purpose of avenging justice by the murder of Colonel Ellsworth.

Ephraim Elmer Ellsworth was born in the little village of Mechanicsville, on the left bank of the Hudson, on the 23d day of April, 1837.  When he was very young, his father, through no fault of his own, lost irretrievably his entire fortune, in the tornado of financial ruin that in those years swept from the sea to the mountains.  From this disaster he never recovered.  Misfortune seems to have followed him through life, with the insatiable pertinacity of the Nemesis of a Greek tragedy.  And now in his old age, when for a moment there seemed to shine upon his path the sunshine that promised better days, he finds that suddenly withdrawn, and stands desolate, “stabbed through the heart’s affections, to the heart.”  His younger son died some years ago, of small-pox, in Chicago, and the murder at Alexandria leaves him with his sorrowing wife, lonely, amid the sympathy of the world.

The days of Elmer’s childhood and early youth—­were passed at Troy and in the city of New York, in pursuits various, but energetic and laborious.  There is little of interest in the story of these years.  He was a proud, affectionate, sensitive, and generous boy, hampered by circumstance, but conscious of great capabilities,—­not morbidly addicted to day-dreaming, but always working heartily for something beyond.  He was still very young—­when he went to Chicago, and associated himself in business with Mr. Devereux of Massachusetts.[A] They managed for a little while, with much success, an agency for securing patents to inventors.  Through the treachery of one in whom they had reposed great confidence they suffered severe losses which obliged them to close their business, and Devereux went back to the East.  The next year of Ellsworth’s life was a miracle of endurance and uncomplaining fortitude.  He read law with great assiduity, and supported himself by copying, in the hours that should have been devoted to recreation.  He had no pastimes and very few friends.  Not a soul beside himself and the baker