The name of no New Hampshire man of the present generation is more broadly known than that of WALTER HARRIMAN. His distinguished services to the state, both in the legislature and in the executive chair; his honorable service as an officer of the Union army; the important trusts he has held at the hands of one and another of our national administrations; and, not least, his brilliant gifts as an orator, which have made him always welcome to the lyceum platform and have caused him to be widely and eagerly sought for in every important election campaign for many years,--combine to make him one of the most conspicuous men in our commonwealth. The Harriman family is of English origin. Rev. Ezekiel Rogers, a man of eminence in the church, was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1590. He graduated at the University of Cambridge, in 1610. Becoming a dissenter from the Church of England, after twenty-five years of faithful service, his ministerial functions were suspended. He says of himself: "For refusing to read that accursed book that allowed sports on God's holy Sabbath, I was suspended, and by it and other sad signs driven, with many of my hearers, into New England." This stanch Puritan arrived on these shores in 1638. In his devoted flock there was an orphan lad, sixteen years of age, named Leonard Harriman, and from this youthful adventurer the subject of our sketch descended, being of the seventh generation. Rogers selected for his colony an unoccupied tract of country between Salem and Newburyport, Mass., to which he gave the name of Rowley, that being the name of the parish in Yorkshire to which he had long ministered. The oldest son of Leonard Harriman was massacred, with ninety of his comrades,--"the flower of Essex county,"--in King Philip's war, September 18, 1675, at Bloody Brook. The great-grandfather of Walter Harriman saw eight years of hard service in the French and Revolutionary wars. His grandfather settled in the wilds of Warner, at the foot of the Mink hills, but lost his life, by an accident, at the early age of twenty-eight. His father, the late Benjamin E. Harriman, was a man of character and influence through an honorable life. He reared a large family at the ancestral home in Warner, where the subject of our sketch, being the third son, was born April 8, 1817.