peaceful skies, and lay his dust at last where for so long had been his heart, was the measure of his earthly desires. The mental and moral outgrowths of his best life had taken root in Oregon, and if it were only to water and enrich the soil where they were planted with his tears and his ashes, this last possible office he prayed with a great desire to be permitted to perform. Nor did he forget where, beneath the oaks of the lovely vale of the Willamette, rested the weary dust of his two beloved companions, the heroic sharers of his exile and his toil. And as a last reason, appealing to the deepest, loveliest nature of humanity, the ties of his fatherhood had been stretched across a continent, the only being calling him father yet remaining near the shores of the Pacific. How could he die and she far away? Had not duty dealt hardly with him already in calling him away almost before even his countenance could be impressed on her memory? Must he now die and she only know of him as father through traditions rehearsed in her ear? That he reluctantly submitted to that conviction is not wonderful; nor that his brave soul struggled to pluck a few more years from the grave, to add another chapter to the history of a life scarcely past meridian years. But it was all in vain.

The last time probably that his name was signed

by his own hand to a letter was on the 8th day of February, 1845, four days more than a month before his death. The letter was directed to Rev. G. Hines, long his friend and the appointed guardian of his child. The letter was written by another, though signed by his own hand. In it he said:

"I think I mentioned in my last that I was afflicted with a severe cold. No remedial aid I could procure has been able to remove it, and unless some favorable change occurs soon it is my deliberate conviction that it will prove fatal. Should such a

favorable change take place I may advise you to be looking out for me coming around Cape Horn, or threading my way up the Willamette in a canoe as I used to do. But if I never make my appearance what shall I say concerning the 'dear little one.' Let her have if possible a first-rate education, but above all do not neglect her religious education. Dear Brother and Sister Hines, I must hold you responsible, under God, to train that child for heaven.

I remain your affectionate friend and brother, JASON LEE.

He longed to return to Oregon to pick up again such threads as he might of the old life, yet he was calm, knowing what betided but not fearing it; steady, noble, a warrior figure to the last, dying as those who loved him might have wished to see him die. On the 12th day of March, 1845, at 41 years of age, he was absent from the body

but present with the Lord.

He was absent but

accounted for. He was with the heroes.

Here it is proper to say that the daughter of Jason Lee and Lucy Thompson, into whose deep eyes he never looked after he laid her in the arms of her devoted foster-mother on that "lone isle of the sea," lived to become one of the most accomplished graduates of the Willamette University, the school her father founded as the "Oregon Institute," and then the most successful preceptress that institution ever had. Then in her full orbed, majestic womanhood she lay down to rest by her mother's side in "Lee Mission Cemetery," at Salem, Oregon, the old Chemekete, a spot consecrated by the sacred dust of more of the pioneer heroes and heroines of American civilization and American Christianity than sleep anywhere else by the shores of the western sea. In the cemetery at. Stanstead, in Lower Canada, there reposes precious dust that Oregon covets as her own, that it might sleep with this. Surely the hero should rest by

the side of the heroines.