John Brown was born at Torrington, Connecticut on the ninth day of May, 1800, in a poor wooden house among the round Appalachian hills which the man loved, in a peculiar way, to the day of his death. His father, a tanner and shoemaker, had lived in that house and township but a year when John Brown was born; but in the country within the little circle made by Windsor, Canton, Norfolk, Litchfield, and Torrington, the father and all the folk had been born and bred, and their fathers before them. It was all a part of the same land of round hills and winding valleys, inhabited by the same hard-working and fiercely thinking people.
Mr. W. E. Forster sums up well enough the story of Brown's ancestry when he says that he "was of the best blood in America." Some careful gene-
