the decision of the voice of God, as manifested by the voice of the people. Having expended his last dollar in pursuing his legal studies, he only waited to vote, as a matter of form, and borrowing $10, with which to reach Louisville, Ky., then the paradise of Northern teachers, he started out to find work and bread. While teaching in Shelby County, of that State, he enlisted in May, 1846, in Humphrey Marshall's regiment of Mounted Volunteers for the Mexican War, and, with his regiment, was mustered in at Louisville, going to Memphis by boat. From there they marched to Little Rock, crossed the Red River at Fulton, and diagonally from the northeast corner of Texas to the Rio Grande, near Camargo. This wearisome trail of many hundreds of miles, much of it through the swamps in mid-summer, bridging morasses and quicksands, was more fatal to life than a severe battle would have been. January 23, 1847, in company with Capt. Cassius M. Clay, of the same regiment, and Maj. Solon Borland, of Yell's regiment of Arkansas Mounted Volunteers, and seventy others, he was captured by 3,000 Mexican cavalry, and their imprisonment lasted until October, during which time he was marched nearly 2,000 miles under guard, and confined in many different prisons, the most noted of which was that of Santiago, in the City of Mexico. He at one time escaped, with a comrade, and after severe toil and suffering of several days' duration, narrowly escaped butchery at the hands of his captors. He also had a memorable escape from death on the second day after the capture at Encarnacian, but owing to the coolness and courage of Cassius M. Clay, he was saved from an ignominious death. He, with most of the survivors, was liberated at Tampico, and narrowly escaped going to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, owing to an unseaworthy Government steamer, during a storm on the twelve days' trip from Tampico to the Balize. Young Scott was selected by his comrades to write up the events of their unique war experience, which he did in an octavo book of 128 pages, published at Louisville in 1848, the title being-" Encarnacian ; or, the Prisoners in Mexico." In 1849, having married in January, Miss Selina A. Bell, of Orange County, N. Y., he was elected principal of the New Bath Seminary at Owingsville, Ky., and in 1852 he bought and published the Kentucky Whig, at Mt. Sterling. Two years later he resumed teaching and opened a boarding school for girls at, Flemingsburg. On the first day of August in that year, while he was selecting lands for entry in Iowa, his wife died of cholera at Bell's Chalybeate Springs, in Fleming County, leaving an infant son. The ensuing two years were employed mainly in visiting Masonic Grand Lodges and eminent Masons in the interest of the Universal Masonic Library, a publication of thirty large volumes, under the auspices of the eminent Masonic Poet Laureate, Robert Morris. This work brought him to the Grand Lodge of Iowa, in 1856, where he learned that his investments of two years before in Benton and Tama Counties had rapidly appreciated in value, and he then determined to make Iowa his home. Of this visit and its results, Hon. T. S. Parwin, then, as now, Grand Secretary, relates in his sketch of Scott as Grand Master, published in the volume for 1873, the following incidents: " We well remember that at the communication at Oskaloosa in 1856, the Grand Lodge wound up with a sort of experience meeting, or love-feast, as it would be called by the Methodist brethren. The writer was making (says Parwin) as he supposed, the last speech, and was somewhat happy in his effort, under the inspiration of the occasion, when, as he concluded, a voice as if of thunder from the farthest corner of the hall rose upon the doubly silent