or, in some comic part upon the stage, would convulse the audience with a laughter that would tickle the ribs for whole days afterwards, and cause the very mention of his name to excite the risibles of the hearer! Poor Finn! Who of the vast multitude that knew you, has not paid to your memory the tribute of a tear?

There is no record of the personal experience of any one of their companions, except that of the four who were saved; and we have none of Adolphus Harnden. That he behaved with courage and fortitude we have no reason to doubt.

Express messengers have, in numerous instances of disaster by sea and land, distinguished themselves by their presence of mind and intrepidity in seeking to save or serve those in distress around them. In Harnden's case, any attempt to rescue his fellow passengers would have been futile. His only care was for the safety of the very heavy amount of treasure which he had in his charge. He took his iron safe, containing about $40,000, from the crate before the boats were swamped, in the hope of getting it into one of them, after they had done their office in conveying the passengers and others ashore. Finding it was too heavy for that, he may have opened it and taken out the packages, for their better conveyance. Probably all, or a portion, of the $12,000 in specie belonging to the Merchants' Bank had not been put into the safe, for one who was there says that he saw the boxes used by some persons in throwing water upon the flames.

The safe was upon castors, and it rolled overboard when the steamer lurched. It has never been found, nor any portion of the money. Fragments of the crate were picked up a short time afterwards, but nothing of any value. The body of the unfortunate messenger was never recovered.

On the day following the disaster, Captain Comstock, accompanied by Dexter Brigham, Jr., and two or three other gentlemen, proceeded with his crew, in the steamer Statesman, to hunt for such of the poor creatures as might yet be alive upon the icy shores, or afloat upon spars, &c. Crowley, the second mate, was found in good quarters, having floated ashore on a bale of cotton (which, by the way, he gratefully preserves in remembrance of its service); and three others were saved,

but no trace was discovered of the unfortunate Express conductor.

Early in 1840, Harnden contemplated an extension of his line to Philadelphia; and, in the spring of that year, he commissioned E. L. Stone to go thither and act as his agent. Pullen was the Boston messenger.

In November, 1840, D. Brigham, Jr., became a partner of Harnden, and went to England to establish a transatlantic express line and foreign exchange business. This step was regarded with favor, and through the energy of Harnden had become, in 1842, a popular institution, highly creditable to American enterprise.

At that date William F. Harnden was upon the top wave of popularity; but what are splendid means and wide-spread reputation to a man, if the still greater source of enjoyment, good health, is denied to him? Though constrained by his failing strength to ride to his place of business in his carriage, Harnden still labored at his headwork with unabated zeal. His Boston, New York and Philadelphia Express and his Foreign Express were not his sole care. He conceived that his influence in Europe could not be better fostered and extended than by Harnden & Co.'s undertaking to afford the most sure and satisfactory facilities for the emptying of the overflowing population of the Old into the fertile western valleys of the New World. When Henry Wells had urged upon him, a year or two before, the importance of extending his line from Albany to Buffalo, and thence westward, Harnden replied: “Put a people there, and my Express shall soon follow." He did not want to waste time to court the patronage of unpopulated prairies; and it was this thought, probably, that was the seed of his emigration project at a later period. With more experience, he might have realized the fact, that Express facilities may lead as well as follow population.

Harnden desired, with all his heart, to have the Great West traversed by railroads in every direction. He saw that the "lay of the land" offered no such difficulties to their construction as had been experienced among the rocks and hills of New England; and, with comparatively small expense, the

immense distances, which appalled those who were looking wistfully to the productive and easily cutivated western prairies, could be overcome, and the vast Valley of the Mississippi be rendered accessible to the enterprising spirits of the crowded eastern States, and the starving millions of Europe. There was no exorbitant prices to be paid for "rights of way," no impediment to obtaining materials for construction; the only difficulty was to procure laborers. Great Britain was rich in its numerous gangs of experienced navvies, thoroughly experienced in excavating, banking, tunneling, bridging, &c.; but the demand for similar labor, in this country, vastly exceeded the supply. The more that Harnden thought of this (and the subject exercised his mind for several months, at the period of which we are writing), the more confirmed he became in the desire to be himself the means of bringing into the United States the requisite labor force from the surplus of Great Britain and the continent. Up to that time there had been no organized and well-regulated system of emigration. If a shipload of foreigners arrived, the chances were that they were the dregs of a European poor-house, with neither the inclination nor the physical ability for labor; but if, on the contrary, they were of the better class of emigrants, able and anxious to go west and work, there were many hindrances to their getting thither, and little or no means of communicating with, and remitting money to, the friends whom they had left behind them in the old country. Wm. F. Harnden determined to remedy, if possible, all these difficulties. He had established, as we have said, his Express offices in the principal cities of England and France. He lost no time in doing the like in Scotland, Ireland and Germany; and so arranged it that Harnden & Co., at all their offices in the United States, could make bills of exchange, either upon their foreign agents or upon first-class bankers, in all those cities, for any amount, from one pound upwards, for the accommodation of emigrants who, having settled and made a little money, desired to remit it safely and expeditiously to friends at home, to pay their passage to America.

Having made this arrangement widely known, the effect of it was soon manifested, agreeably to Harnden's expectation.

The Irish and German residents (but especially the former, who are more impulsive) began to buy the bills, and send home to their friends to join them in this land of plenty. The facility of remittance thus provided by Harnden & Co. (and so extensively imitated by a host of small bankers since that time) gave a very decided impetus to emigration from Great Britain. It was precisely what was wanted to give it a start. Harnden's next move was to arrange with Enoch Train & Co., the large packet-ship owners in Boston, for the cheap conveyance of emigrants from Liverpool. His next step was to contract with the owners of the numerous lines upon the N. Y. and Erie Canal for the exclusive use of all their passenger boats. It was an immense monopoly, but never abused, and saved the emigrants and other passengers from being confused by opposition lines, and fleeced by runners and other land-sharks, who, prior to that time, used to fatten upon the plunder of ignorant travelers.

Harnden was almost as great a believer in the advantages of publicity as is the very liberal, resolute, enterprising and successful Mr. Robert Bonner, of the New York Ledger, who has wrought so remarkable a revolution in advertising within the last few years. Ex. gr.-Young Smith, in Harnden & Co.'s Boston office, received an order from Nat. Greene, at that time, to get a thousand white cards printed, relative to the enterprise; the size of them to be somewhat smaller than his hand. "His hand!" exclaimed Harnden, when he heard of the order, "have them a foot square, five thousand of them, and the color red. If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing thoroughly." Then writing down the order explicitly, he handed it to Smith; and in two weeks afterwards there was hardly a hotel, steamboat, or depot in the United States in which was not seen one or more of those large showy flaming-red placards, announcing, and keeping before the people, the admirable arrangement which Harnden & Co. had consummated for the passage of emigrants from Liverpool to New York, Buffalo, Chicago, &c. A thousand or more, also, were conspicuously posted at the railway stations, and other appropriate places, in England, Ireland, Scotland, and on the continent. Ilarnden employed, too, numerous passenger agents in Europe, and used

every possible means to make the laboring class-and especially those who could be serviceable in the construction of railroads-appreciate that it was for their interest to come and settle in the western world. Probably no one man ever did more to make the resources of the west, and the inducements to emigrate thither, extensively appreciated in Great Britain than William F. Harnden. After his death, his partners were reproached that in their zeal to obtain passengers they suffered their foreign agents to overrate the facilities and rewards of emigration; but that charge, whether true or false, was never made against Harnden himself. He knew that the labor of a country was her most certain source of wealth, and never was this unerring law of political economy more manifest than in the United States. On the one hand, he saw his native State of Massachusetts, without either agricultural or mining advantages, made rich by the industry of her sons and daughters; on the other, he beheld immense prairies in the western States and territories yielding no support to man, but ready to fill millions of barns and granaries to overflowing with the abundance of the earth, as soon as the hand of labor should come to develop their endless resources. It was with the most heartfelt gratification, then, that Harnden realized the entire success of what may be not inaptly called his Foreign Passenger Express. At the close of the year 1844, that small-sized, fragile man, whose constitution, never healthy, was now wasted by the consumption which was rapidly measuring the little remnant of life yet left to him, had the satisfaction of knowing that he had been the direct means of bringing from the Old World more than 100,000 hard-handed laborers, and depositing them in that now magnificent portion of our country where their work was most wanted, for the cultivation of the soil, and the construction of railways and canals. He had no bodily strength, himself, for that sublime work which has since made the west an incalculably productive farm, traversed in all directions by over ten thousand miles of railroad, and affording happy homes to millions of people; but yet (and it was his consolation in the last hours of his brief but active and eventful career) he had brought more muscle to that prodigious labor than any Hercules among them all.