pirate's disadvantage. He, however, refused to sign the piratic compact, and for that was assigned harder services, and watched with some care. At the end of his two months Phillips told him that he needed. him three months longer, when he would dismiss him. But at the end of this time he refused entirely to consider the matter, and Fillmore now saw that his only chance for liberty was by some plan of escape. His hardships became more serious and aggravating, and his life was a constant contest with Phillips for existence. As time passed some other unwilling men were pressed into the pirate's service; and with two of these, while the Captain and his crew were in a drunken debauch, Fillmore fell upon them and killed Phillips and others, and with some prisoners on board gained the mastery, and ran the pirate craft into Boston harbor. In the court of admiralty John Fillmore was highly complimented for his long-suffering, daring, and service to the country and world, and rewarded by a gift from the court of the gun, silver-hilted sword, silver shoes and knee-buckles, tobacco-box and two gold rings belonging to Phillips, the pirate. This very worthy exploit terminated John's sea-faring life. In the winter of 1824 he married Mary Spiller, and soon after settled in the woods as a farmer near Franklin, Connecticut, to which place some of his acquaintances, and possibly relatives, had emigrated. Here he reared a family, and passed the remainder of his days.

One of his sons, Nathaniel, settled at or near

Bennington, Vermont, and there lived throughout his life. He fought in the Revolutionary War, and was in the battle which took the name of his own town, as well as on other fields. He died in 1814, at an advanced age, after rearing a family of six children, who, like himself, lived to be very old, none of them dying under eighty. Of his wife's family little of importance can be found. Of his occupation, also, little is known, although it is probable that, like all or most of the Fillmores, he was a farmer. The next in line to this Revolutionary Nathaniel was his son Nathaniel, the father of President Millard Fillmore, born April 19, 1771, at Bennington.

In the winter of 1797 Nathaniel Fillmore was married to Phoebe Millard, the young daughter of Dr. Abiather Millard, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and soon afterwards set out with his brother, Calvin, to locate and establish a home in an unsettled part of New York. Spending the greater part of the year in this work, early in 1799 he took his young wife to her cabin-home in Cayuga County, a location in the selection of which he had shown a total want of business skill or foresight. Here, however, he succeeded in opening a little farm, and acquiring a title to it which he soon afterwards found to rest upon a poor foundation. After the loss of his land Fillmore took a lease of another tract in Niles Township, of the same county, and here in one of the poorest and most inconvenient parts of the State went to raising children and attempting to eke out

a bare existence, if not a miserable one. Although he had spent the greater part of his life as a young man and boy in working on a farm, and subsequently followed no other pursuit, like the great mass of men in any profession or calling he never exhibited much skill; and, notwithstanding his good age of nearly ninety, when he came to die he had not been successful. Yet the solid traits usually found in his family were always shown in him to such an extent as to secure him the esteem of his neighbors. While residing in Cayuga County he served for a number of years as justice of the peace.

In the spring of 1820 he removed to Erie County, and settled near Aurora, sixteen miles from Buffalo. There he secured a little farm, now styled the "Fillmore Place," which he mainly cultivated with his own hands until he became an old man. Here, too, he died, near the opening of the Rebellion, and after his son had reached the pinnacle of his fame. His body, with that of his first wife, who died at the early age of fifty, and that also of his second wife, "reposes" in the village grave-yard. Nathaniel Fillmore was a large and portly man, six feet or over in height, and, like most members of the Fillmore family, possessed of great vigor and strength of body, which he maintained to the end of his life. While his son was President he made a trip to Washington, and remained some time at the White House; but his plain tastes and habits were out of place at the gay Capital. He was present at one or two of the Presidential receptions; but did not appear greatly

saw, or the extraordinary He had been anxious for

elated over the things he good fortune of his son. him to study law, and his success in his profession had been to him a source of pride and satisfaction, and in his latter years his son's resources added much to his own comfort. He was a man of exemplary habits, and of known integrity of character, but had no especial influence among his neighbors. He possessed a kind of rough, stern integrity, which was copied to a great extent in his only distinguished son, but with the added caution and policy which came from political aspirations and partisan contest. While he was not a pious man, or a member of a Church, he was a sincere believer in, and respecter of, Christianity.

The Fillmores were a race of strong, ponderoussized men, usually of great longevity, and were laborious, plodding, unassuming, and of moderate mental capacities, seldom, however, exhibiting much inclination to cultivate what they had, and from John, the father of John, the forced pirate, to the President, men of great simplicity and integrity of character. From first to last none of them were public benefactors, especially or prominently; none of them were, in a marked way, exemplars of any great virtues, while all of them were men of general purity and uprightness of life; but two of all of them in the four or five generations known in America, rose to public distinction, and with these the race virtually ended. A family of well-developed men-mentally, morally, and physically-who

preserved this development to the end, and whose only source of pride was in this development, while it had nothing in it of which it could be ashamed.

Of the Millard family there is still less to be said. Mr. Fillmore's mother was the daughter of Dr. Abiather Millard, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a man of some ability and standing, but of quiet and undistinguished life. His daughter was married to Nathaniel Fillmore at the age of sixteen, and soon afterward entered upon her laborious life in the wildernesses of New York. The burdens of a large family and a rude home soon broke her health, and the latter part of her life was one of weakness and suffering. She died April 2, 1831, a few years after her son first entered upon his political life as a member of the New York Legislature. She was a woman of fine natural traits of mind and an amiable and admirable disposition; with a really delicate and refined nature, under other circumstances she would have been of some note in a sex having little opportunity or inclination for distinction. Like the mothers of most of the Presidents down to James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and all the later ones, she was, techinally speaking, a woman of little education and culture. So little stress can be placed upon the benefits to be derived from thorough education in the lives of the mothers of the Presidents, that the subject hardly merits notice, and an attempt to make something in that way would be deserving of ridicule. Most of them have, indeed, been women. of exemplary lives, good and admirable qualities of