Excerpt from Historical Collections, Vol. 1 of 2 The gathering of the scraps of history here presented, has been the result of the employment of leisure time not required for service in a mercantile life of active labor through a period. Of more than forty years, and nearly all arranged in chrono logical order, and written out after the writer had passed the bounds of threescore years and ten. If these Collections shall be the means of preserving from oblivion any considerable amount of the facts therein contained, so as to enable others to use them better, and more interestingly, at some future period, the writer will have satisfied the extent of his aspirations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.