I need not say that these farms were of little benefit to those who received them, for our colored friends are by no means the men to go upon a patch of northern soil and wring an independent livelihood out of it. Gerrit Smith was a sort of blind, benevolent Samson, amazingly ignorant of human nature, of human life, and of the conditions upon which alone the welfare of our race is promoted. He died in 1874, aged seventy-seven, having lived one of the strangest lives ever recorded, and having exhibited a cast of character which excites equal admiration and regret. PETER FORCE. One of the interesting sights of the city of Washington used to be the library of "Old Peter Force," as he was familiarly called,--Colonel Peter Force, as he was more properly styled. He was one of the few colonels of that day who had actually held a colonel's command, having been regularly commissioned by the President of the United States as a colonel of artillery in the District of Columbia. He might, indeed, have been called major-general, for in his old age he held that rank in the militia of the district. And a very fine-looking soldier he must have been in his prime, judging from the portrait which used to hang in the library, representing a full-formed man, tall and erect, his handsome and benevolent countenance set off by an abundance of curly hair. His library had about the roughest furniture ever seen in an apartment containing so much that was valuable. As I remember it, it was a long, low room, with streets and cross-streets of pine book-shelves, unpainted, all filled with books to their utmost capacity--a wilderness of books, in print and in manuscript, mostly old and dingy, and almost all of them relating in some way to American history. The place had a very musty smell; and as most of its treasures were in the original bindings, or without bindings, few persons would have suspected the priceless value of the collection. I am acquainted with a certain library in New York of several thousand volumes, most of which are bound resplendently in calf and gold, and the room in which they are kept is "as splendid as a steamboat," but old Peter Force could show you single alcoves of his library which, at a fair valuation, would buy out all that mass of sumptuosity.