It availed nothing but to show his coolness and skill. At length, when the hours were exhausted, and there were symptoms of impatience, he asked what was to happen if he did not resign; and they told him-" his fate." He might guess what that would be, in the general; but not liking any particular aspect of it, he concluded that it was better to do what he was told to do. He wrote and signed a resignation of his commission as stamp-master. He pulled off his hat, and hurra'd three times for "Liberty and Property," after they had deprived him of both; and then, knowing that he was bound to Hartford, they marched with him to the outside of the Hall of the Legislature, and left him there at liberty to go in, or to go home, as he might think best.

This was the first, and, perhaps, the best conducted case of Lynch law, that our books report. It shed no blood, it broke no bones, and it accommodated the constituted authorities to their hearts' content. The Stamp Act was dead, and the death could not be laid at their door. A striking feature to disprove personal malice on any side was this: that, although affidavits were taken and filed, and some show made of calling out the judicial authorities, Mr. Ingersoll named no names, though he knew the leaders, as well as they knew him.

Such a contest would ordinarily have driven the weaker party into exile, or the extremity of opposi

tion; but in this case it did neither. Mr. Ingersoll, the elder, was loyal to the British Constitution and to the Crown, as were hundreds of thousands of the Colonists in the same day; but he never was a loyalist in the special sense, and his refusal to surrender his commission except by the application of vis major, did not alienate the people from him, nor him from them. He remained in his natal homestead; but during the ten years of irritated pride on one side, and of dogged contumacy on the other, which intervened between the repeal of the Stamp Act and the Declaration of Independence, he was more of an observer than an actor; and as, in the later years of that decade, the country waxed more and more warm, and the attention of young men was turning more and more every day to arms rather than to the law, he sent his son, in the year 1774, from the contagious atmosphere of Connecticut, to finish his law education in London.

Mr. Ingersoll, the son, continued in that school until shortly before or after the Declaration of Independence, when he embarked for France, and resided there until the autumn of 1778. From that country to his own, he passed in an American letter of marque, Aagrante bello, and, as I have heard him say, came pretty much under water, from press of sail, to avoid disagreeable interviews on the way.

His London life, from his own account, as well as from that of Edward Tilghman, his cotemporary for part of the time, must have been pretty equally divided between study and pleasure; though in the allotment for the latter, he included a large portion of exercise on foot. In the summer season he lived in ̧ the country, ten miles from his place of study in the City, and not unfrequently footed that interval both morning and afternoon. As a proof of the extent to which females in England use their feet and limbs in the same healthful way, he told me that one of the daughters of his hostess sometimes accompanied him, and, after dropping him in the City in the morning, trotted back with him at the close of the afternoon. The value of that exercise was his frequent theme. He profited by it in his youth, and was able in his old age to dispense with it, by the confirmation it had given to his health. It is as necessary a foundation for a lawyer as his professional studies. Both sexes in our country, and especially in our cities, would take more of it, if our climate, like that of England, and of the Continent generally, would give its more frequent consent; but few of them take as much of it as they might; for to the habitual walker, a cloud is not so often a shower-bath as it is a parasol, nor is the sun so much a scorcher to the quickfooted as to the slow. Next to St. Peter's full ordinance, it deserves universal observance by men of our profession, that "if

they will love life and see good days," they must give a fair portion of their practice to their legs. After doing my best, one morning, to overtake Chief-Justice Marshall in his quick march to the Capitol, when he was nearer to eighty than to seventy, I asked him to what cause in particular he attributed that strong and quick step; and he replied that he thought it was most due to his commission in the army of the Revolution, in which he had been a regular foot practitioner for nearly six years.

From relations of friendship between Mr. Ingersoll's father and Joseph Reed, then recently elected a member of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, under the Constitution of 1776, and chosen President of that body by the joint ballot of the General Assembly and Council, the son was encouraged by President Reed to remove to Philadelphia for advancement in his profession; and he accordingly removed thither in 1778, was admitted to the Bar in January, 1779, married the eldest daughter of Charles Pettit in 1781, and continued in professional service in that City all the active years of his life, and died there at the age of 72, on the 31st of October, 1822. He had his English education in the law, consequently, some years after he had attained his majority.

Though encouraged to remove to Philadelphia by the President of the Executive Council, and promised his patronage, which no doubt he received as far as it

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could be afforded, Mr. Ingersoll's success at the Bar, like that of every other lawyer of eminence, was, and must have been, his own work. He received a retainer from the State, during President Reed's administration, as an assistant to the Attorney-General, Mr. Sergeant, in the matter of the Proprietary estates, which were vested in the Commonwealth, as the Act of Confiscation calls it, in the year 1779: and the Reports show him to have been associated with the counsel of the State in one or two cases in the year 1780. He was in friendly, and, by his marriage, in family relations, with President Reed, during the three years of his presidency, and until his death in 1785; and was an executor of his will. But President Reed's political ardor during his term of office, and an imbittered opposition to him which had been kindled among men of business and of importance, in Philadelphia, did not make his return to the Bar, in 1781, very easy or agreeable; nor, as I have heard Mr. Ingersoll say, did his mind return willingly to the pursuits of the law. The patron, therefore, must have been more willing than able to assist him; and in a short time Mr. Reed's health gave way, and after visiting England in 1783, he returned toward the close of 1784, and, without attempting to resume his profession, died on the 5th March, 1785. Mr. Ingersoll wanted no other patron than his own talents, learning, integrity, and industry; and if he had wanted any of