The son of a farmer--a man of substance, and of credit with his neighbors, and not less with the people of his State--young Chase drew from his boyhood the vigor of body and of mind which rural life and labors are well calculated to nourish. Several of his father's brothers were graduates of this college, and reached high positions in Church and State. An unpropitious turn of the commercial affairs of the country nipped, with its frost, the growing prosperity of his father, whose death, soon following, left him, in tender years, and as one of a numerous family, to the sole care of his mother. With most scanty means, her thrift and energy sufficed to save her children from ignorance or declining manners; maintained their self-respect and independence; set them forth in the world well disciplined, stocked with good principles, and inspired with proud and honorable purposes. To the praise of this excellent woman, wherever the name of her great son shall be proclaimed, this, too, shall be told in remembrance of her: that a Christian's faith, and a mother's love, as high and pure as ever ennobled the most famous matrons of history, stamped the character and furnished the education which equipped him for the labors and the triumphs of his life. One cannot read her letters to her son in college without the deepest emotion. How many such women were there, in the plain ranks of New England life, in her generation! How many are there now! Paying marvelous little heed to the discussion of women's rights, they show a wonderful addiction to the performance of women's duties. His uncle, Bishop Chase of Ohio, assumed, for a time, the care and expense of his education, and this drew him to the West, where, under this tutelage, he pursued academic studies for two years. At the end of this time he returned to his mother's charge, entered the junior class of Dartmouth College, and graduated in the year 1826, at the age of eighteen. The only significance, in its impression on his future life, of this brief guardianship of the Western Bishop, was as the determining influence which fixed the chief city of the West in his choice as the forum and arena of his professional and public life. After spending four years in Washington, gaining his subsistence by teaching, a law-student with Mr. Wirt--then at the zenith of his faculties and his fame--studying men and manners at the capital, watching the new questions then shaping themselves for political action, observing the celebrated statesmen of the day, conversant with the great Chief-Justice Marshall and his learned associates on the bench of the Supreme Court, and with Webster, and Binney, and other famous lawyers at its bar, he was admitted to practice, and, at the age of twenty-two, established himself at Cincinnati, transferring thus, once and forever, his home from the New England of his family, his birth, his education, and his love, to the ruder but equally strenuous and more expansive society of the West.