is clear that any examination of the forces that raised Indiana into an enlightened community must comprehend a knowledge of these early struggles, and that the showier attainments of later citizens cannot obscure for the sincere student the services of those who dared to stand for the cause of free schools in the day of their peril. Mills is an especially admirable and winning figure. He was hardly equalled for sagacity and suavity among his contemporaries, and he brought to bear upon his great task a steadfastness and quiet energy that no defeat could overcome. The State recognized his abilities and rewarded his services by confiding to him the office of State superintendent of public instruction, of which he was the second incumbent. He was deeply though sanely patriotic, and during the Civil War his zeal for the Union cause was so marked that one of his associates pronounced him the best recruiting officer in Indiana. He belonged to Wabash College, and continued in its faculty until the end of his long life (October 17, 1879), giving his last years, with characteristic unselfishness and devotion, to the organization of the college library. The early Hoosier school-teachers were often poorly trained, and sometimes were adventurers from England, Scotland, or Ireland. Occasionally they were intemperate, and frequently they were eccentric characters, whose vagaries made them ridiculous before their pupils; but there were competent instructors among them. One of the most charming figures in the history of cultivation in Indiana is Mrs. Julia L. Dumont (1794-1857), who was born in Ohio, but for forty-three years resided at Vevay, in Switzerland County. Among all the light-bringers of the first half of the century in the Hoosier country Mrs. Dumont was one of the most distinguished; and she was easily the woman of most varied accomplishment in the Indiana of her day. She possessed an instinct for teaching, and Dr. Eggleston remembers that after she was sixty a schoolroom was built for her beside her husband’s house, and that she taught the Vevay High School in her old age, when no properly qualified teacher appeared to take charge of it. Dr. Eggleston draws her portrait from memory:--