Page:Oregon Literature by Horner.djvu/123

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OREGON LITERATURE.
95

heroic thought that he was pre-eminently engaged in reclaiming the wilderness building a home founding an American state and extending the area of liberty. He had visions, however dimly seen, that he was here to do for this country what his ancestors had done for savage England centuries before to plant a community which in due time should grow and ripen into one of the great sisterhood of Anglo-American states, wherein the language of the Bible, Shakespeare and Milton should be spoken by millions then unborn, and the law of Magna Charta and Westminster Hall be the bulwark of liberty and the buttress of order for generations to come.

—Matthew P. Deady.



SENATOR NESMITH AND HIS TUTOR.

Senator Nesmith always was passionately fond of books, and, notwithstanding misfortune and hardship, at that time exhibited much of the same high spirit and love of fun and humor that he always retained. The tutor he remembered most vividly was one Gregor MacGregor, to whom he went to school one hundred and twenty days and received one hundred thrashings. He admitted it was the only school where he ever learned anything, and, notwithstanding a genuine feeling of regard for his old tutor, had vowed he would thrash him if he was ever large enough. The time