This sketch has in view the treatment neither of Frémont's career as a soldier nor as a politician, which phases of his life, viewed by ordinary circumstances, may be considered as unsuccessful. It need not be here dwelt on that his name became a watchword of the ever-growing spirit of human freedom, and that as the standard-bearer of an idea he astonished the country and the world by obtaining the suffrages of nearly one and a half millions of his countrymen for the highest office in the gift of the people. His unwavering, if impractical, devotion to freedom was forcibly illustrated by his emancipation proclamation in Missouri, which he declined to recall, even at the request of the President who revoked it. It is undoubted that Frémont's non-success in business and political ventures has tended to diminish his reputation as an explorer, a reputation which, it is safe to say, must continue to grow steadily in the future with the development of the great trans-Rocky Mountain region to which he gave the enthusiasm of his youth, the maturity of his manhood, and for which he sacrificed his profession and his private fortune. While Frémont loved all the great West, it was to California especially that he gave the best he had of mind, heart, and body, never sparing himself in any effort for the upbuilding of her future. So it is that in the scene of his activities on the shores of the golden Pacific, rather than on the coast of the Atlantic, should be more appreciated the labors and ever grow brighter and brighter the name of John C. Frémont, the Pathfinder. IX. ELISHA KENT KANE, ARCTIC EXPLORER. Among the picturesque and striking figures of Arctic explorers none abides more firmly in the minds of Americans than that of Elisha Kent Kane, whose career and fame largely relate to the fate of the lost explorer, Sir John Franklin. Kane was born in Philadelphia, February 3, 1820. In 1842 he graduated in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and the following year, while waiting for a vacancy in the medical corps of the navy, for which he had passed an examination, sailed on the frigate Brandywine, as physician to the embassy, to China, under Caleb Cushing, Minister Plenipotentiary. Later, commissioned as an officer of the medical corps of the United States Navy, he served on the west coast of Africa, in Brazil, in the Mediterranean, and on special duty with the army in Mexico. This brief statement of his duties conveys, however, no idea of the intense energy and restless activity of Kane in his eager efforts to acquire personal knowledge of the very ends of the earth. Indeed, considering Kane's very short life (he died at thirty-seven), there is no man of modern times to whom the words of Tennyson, in his strong poem of Ulysses, more fittingly apply: