Edwin was an accomplished writer at that early day. He had not learned the art at school; for he left school altogether when he was fourteen years of age. At that early period of life, he entered into the printing-office of the _New England Galaxy_, learning to set type, and, shortly, came to have charge of the making up of the paper. My father often said that the best school education one could get was at the compositor's stand. Edwin early began to write for the paper, and I remember, now, with what admiration an article of his on "Massachusetts" was read more than sixty years ago, and while he was yet a boy. The _Galaxy_ was sold in 1827; and my father and brother gave themselves up more particularly to the editorship of the _Courier_. Before Edwin was twenty-one, he spent some winters in Washington, as special correspondent of the newspaper; and while there attracted no little attention from the great men of the nation. He was a young man of active habits, and during the trial of the Whites, at Salem, for the murder of Joseph White, in 1830, at which Mr. Webster made one of his most powerful efforts as a lawyer and advocate, Edwin reported the proceedings. He drove down to Salem in the morning, and back at night with the proceeds of his daily labor, over the cold and foggy marshes of Lynn. Then he took a cold, from the effects of which he never recovered. He used the severest remedies, and, in October, 1832, he sailed for Smyrna; after spending some months there in a home where friendship and kindness did all that nature and skill could accomplish, and finding all means ineffectual, he started for home to die; but a few days before reaching his native land he breathed his last. His remains were committed to the deep in May, 1833. A cenotaph at Mt. Auburn commemorates his birth and death. It bears the inscription of being placed there by "Boston Mechanics." Edwin believed in the mechanic arts, and in what are called laboring men. He had himself been of them. It was fitting also his monument should be reared at Mt. Auburn; it was one of the first stones erected there. He had been himself greatly instrumental in carrying to success the project of turning "Sweet" Auburn, as it had been called, into a cemetery where the ashes of the loved and illustrious might be gathered for a final resting-place.