Another thing is true of deservedly eminent men; they were obedient and dutiful while under the parental roof. A selfish, rebellious boy, never made an honored member of society and of the State. You will find illustrations of these truths in the lives of Washington, Adams, Lincoln, Grant, Mitchel, Sherman, and many others, whose fame is lasting as our institutions. In the year 1634 the Hon. Samuel Sherman, his brother, Rev. John Sherman, and their cousin, Captain John Sherman, who were residents of Dedham, England, came to this country. This was only thirteen years after the _May Flower_, with its pilgrim company, rocked in Massachusetts Bay. There were no ocean steamers then proudly ploughing the broad Atlantic. In a ship like the plain bark which bore the first colony, whose free principles, civil and religious, lie at the foundation of this Republic, they embarked for the wilderness of the New World. You can see, in imagination, the white-winged vessel glide from its haven into the “wide, wide sea,” and float like a speck over the waste of waters. The winds blow, the crested billows toss the _Shermans_, with the rest of the ship’s company, about for weeks; they little dreaming of quite a different storm, in which a descendant would figure so conspicuously, just two hundred and thirty years later. At length the ship reached Boston harbor. The Rev. John Sherman; a graduate of Immanuel College, “and a Puritan,” went at once to his work. The Sabbath dawned, and under an ancient tree in the present town of Watertown, three miles from Boston, you might have seen a quiet and attentive congregation listening to his first sermon in America. Here he settled, after receiving a call to Milford, Conn. Some of his descendants were excellent and popular divines. The captain also settled there; and from his branch of the family came Roger Sherman, the signer of the Declaration of Independence. The Hon. Samuel Sherman pushed on to Wethersfield, Conn. Soon after he removed to Stamford, and finally settled down in Stratford. The “coat of arms,” that is to say, the family escutcheon or badge, bears a lion rampant, and a sea lion on the crest. The motto is: “Conquer death by virtue.” From him descended the “hero of our story,” whose grandfather, Taylor Sherman, for many years judge, died May 4th, 1815, in the ripeness of his manhood, at the age of fifty-eight. The widow, like the families of Generals Grant and Mitchel, and of our most worthy President, turned her face toward the far West; for it was then a long and weary way to the rich valleys of the Mississippi and its tributaries. The beautiful State of Ohio—the empire State of the western world—became her home. The prospects, for her sons especially, on the cheap, rich soil, and in the rising towns of that vast and new territory, were much better than in New England.