he resigned from the army with the rank of major, to carry on his profession as a civil engineer. In the meanwhile Major Whistler had married twice. His first wife was Mary Swift, daughter of Dr. Foster Swift, of the United States army. She left three children: George, who became a well known civil engineer; Joseph, who died in youth; and Deborah, Lady Haden. His second wife was Anna Mathilda McNeill, daughter of Dr. Charles Donald McNeill, of Wilmington, North Carolina, and sister of William Gibbs McNeill, a West Point classmate and an associate in Major Whistler's engineering work. The McNeills were descended from the McNeills of Skye. Their chief, Donald, emigrated with sixty of his clan to North Carolina in 1746, and bought land on Cape Fear River. Charles Donald McNeill was his grandson and was twice married; his second wife, Martha Kingsley, was the mother of Anna Mathilda McNeill, who became Mrs. George Washington Whistler. The McNeills were related by marriage to the Fairfaxes and other Virginia families, and Whistler, on his mother's side, was the Southerner he loved to call himself. In 1834 Major Whistler accepted the post of engineer of locks and canals at Lowell, and to this town he brought his family. There, in the Paul Moody House on Worthen Street, James McNeill Whistler was born, and the house is now a Whistler Memorial Museum. Two years later the second son, William Gibbs McNeill, was born. In 1837 Major Whistler moved to Stonington, Connecticut, and Miss Emma W. Palmer and Mrs. Dr. Stanton, his wife's nieces, still remember his "pleasant house on Main Street." It is said that he had a chaise fitted with car wheels in which he and his family drove every Sunday on the tracks to church at Westerly; also that a locomotive named Whistler was in use on the road until recently. He was consulted in regard to many new lines, among them the Western Railroad of Massachusetts, for which he was consulting engineer from 1836 to 1840. In 1840 he was made chief engineer, and he removed to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he lived in the Ethan Chapin Homestead on Chestnut Street, north of Edward Street. A third son, Kirk Booth, born at Stonington in 1838, died at Springfield in 1842, and here a fourth son, Charles Donald, was born in 1841. In 1842 Nicholas I. of Russia sent a commission, under Colonel Melnikoff, round Europe and America to find the best method and the best man to build a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and they chose the American, George Washington Whistler. The honour was great and the salary large, 12,000 dollars a year. He accepted, and started for Russia in Midsummer 1842, leaving his family at Stonington.