Senator from the Third District, as Counsellor of Hillsborough County, and for several years as Representative at the General Court of the State of New Hampshire. He performed military service in the French War in 1756, and in 1777 he was appointed by the Provincial Council a member of the Committee of Safety. In this latter vear also he was commissioned as a Lieutenant, and with his company served under the command of General Stark at the battle of Bennington, where, after exhibiting cool judgment and great personal bravery, he was wounded and rendered a cripple for life. The verdict of one who knew him well was thus tersely expressed: "He was one of Nature^s nobility."
His son, the Hon. Benjamin Orr, grandfather of Mrs. Williams, was boni in Bedford, N.H., in 1772, and was graduated at Dartmouth Col- lege with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1798. He became a lawyer and settled in Maine, his home, with the exception of a few years that he resided in Topsham, being in Bnmswick. He was eminent as a practitioner in the Su- preme Judicial Court both before and after the separation of Maine from Massachusetts. He represented the old Cumberland District in Congress during the Presidency of James Monroe.
At the time of his death, in 1828, Chief Jus- tice Mellen spoke of him " as one who had long stood, confessedly, at the head of the profession of our State; who had distinguished himself by the depth and solidity of his understanding, by his legal acumen and research, by the power of his intellect, the commanding energy of his reasoning, the uncompromising firmness of his principles, and the dignity and lofty sense of honor, truth, and justice which he uniformly displayed in his professional career and in the walks of private life."
He held the positions of overseer, trustee, and treasurer of Bowdoin College in its earlier days. It was while he was a trustee of the col- lege, and when he attended the annual exami- nations of the classes in the classics, that he was the leading influence in placing the poet Longfellow in the chair of modern languages. Mr. Orr, being an accomplished classical scholar, and the Latin poet Horace being his pocket companion, was charmed with young Long- fellow's translation of the odes of that poet, and at the meeting of the executive board settled the question as follows: "Why, Mr. Longfellow is your man : he is an admirable classical scholar. Seldom have I heard anything more beautiful than his version of one of the most difficult odes of Horace."
Mr. Orr was in politics a Federalist of the old school which maintained the sentiments of "the men who formed and administered for the first twelve yeara the institutions of the United States." His wife, Elizabeth Toppan, a woman of strong character, refined tastes and manners, and domestic virtues, was well fitted to dispense the generous hospitality of his home in Brunswick, Me.
Mrs. Williams's father, the Rev. John Orr, was a graduate (summa cum laude) of Bowdoin College in the large and brilliant class of 1834. The Rev. Mr. Orr was a man of intellectual force and scholastic culture, of great refinement of na- ture, an independent, clear thinker, a man illus- trating in his daily life high moral excellence, a writer of decided merit, able in theological discussion, a student and a Christian gentleman always, as well as a brilliant preacher.
From these thoughtful men, in turn, and from her grandmother Orr and her mother, the late Mary Moore Orr, a woman of active intellect and progressive thought, Mrs. Williams inherited her love for letters, her studious habit, and her power of application. These characteristics evinced themselves early, and the literary turn of her mind found expression in original stories, poems, and essays. She sometimes wrote plays, in which she took the leading parts herself, as in a church festival held in the opera house in South Bend, Ind., and in these dramatic skits she disclosed histrionic talent.
Her original humorous sketches possess the "convulsive element" which is so vital in successful comedy, anjl in this line she is a born impersonator. A natural wit, skilled in repartee, she is sympathetic and benevolent in spirit. The intellectual bias of her mind has always been toward the classics and the highest order of literature, sacred as well as secular.
Mrs. Williams was educated at the Alfred Academy, the Alfred High School, and Maple-
