Mr. Wilder's business and military offices in his native State made him favorably and extensively known there, and secured him a large number of valuable customers in Boston, where he transferred his business and family in 1825. At present his firm is Parker, Wilder & Co., one of the most active, responsible, and respectable commission houses in that city, owning and doing the business of a large number of cotton and woolen mills in different parts of New England.

* Book of the Lockes, pp. 108,198.

In this extensive mercantile house, Mr. Wilder is one of the senior partners, acquainted with all the branches of the business, and ready to cooperate with the members of the firm, but of late years specially devoted to its financial department.

He speedily took rank among the merchants of Boston, and was tendered various offices in its monetary institutions. He has been a Director in the Hamilton Bank and National Insurance Company for more than twenty years; and also in the New England Life Insurance Company, and other kindred institutions. The Boston Atlas, in 1851, says, "Mr. Wilder has for nearly thirty years been one of those ' solid men of Boston' - we mean one of those enterprising, public spirited, and upright merchants, whose virtues have a practical existence, benefiting and ennobling the community of which they are members. But though engaged in the mercantile profession, he has devoted much time to the pure and elevating pursuits of horticulture and agriculture. His name, as the zealous patron and promoter of the noblest of sciences, will fill a luminous page in the history of human progress and improvement - a page that will suffer no detriment by the lapse of years, and which will have its interpreter on every hill side and in every valley where rural taste and refinement are found".

If you would see him at his private desk, call on him at his place of business in the city. If you inquire after Mr. Wilder, you will be conducted to his private counting room, at one corner of which, by the window, sits the subject of our narrative. Observe the books and pamphlets in his favorite departments of thought and action on your left, and the files of papers on your right. Look at his desk - what a quantity of letters to be read, their contents noted, and answers rendered! Bead his memorandum of business to be transacted for the day -enough, you imagine, to employ half a dozen men. He is intensely occupied;, but he catches the first sound of your voice, and rises to greet you in as cordial a manner as if you were his familiar friend, and he had been long expecting you. After mutual salutations, and when you are seated, you feel as much at home as if you were in your own dwelling. If he is too intent on business to devote to you the time and attention which you desire, he frankly avows the fact, and asks you to postpone the subject of your interview to a specified hour. At the time appointed you find that his business has been disposed of; his letters answered; and that he is in readiness to resume your subject, and to devote to it requisite time and attention.

It relates, we will suppose, to a branch of horticulture. His habit of conversation you find free and unreserved. He communicates with ease and affability the results of his reading, observation, and ripe experience.

When you have accomplished the object of your mission and taken your departure, reflection suggests the inquiry how a gentleman engaged in a mercantile business so extensive, can have acquired a fund of information so varied and extensive, a knowledge so profound of the sciences of horticulture, agriculture, and kindred arts. A more familiar acquaintance with Mr, Wilder's natural endowments and private habits, discloses the manner in which he has been enabled to make so extensive attainments, and to pursue objects so various.

The sudden death of his first wife led him to seek the retirement of the country, where he could gratify his native taste for rural life. He purchased and moved into his present residence in June, 1832. It is the first house in Dorchester, on Washington Street, leading from the Main Street, in Roxbury, to the Old South Church, in the former town. His place is called Hawthorn Grove, and is the next residence south of Grove Hall. His dwelling stands back from the street, and is surrounded with grateful shades in variety. His gardens, extensive nurseries, and green-houses, rank among the best furnished in the country. All his buildings are tasteful and convenient His fruit room, which gives him the control of the temperature, of the air and light, is constructed upon scientific and original principles, and enables him to regulate, at pleasure, the ripening process. His grounds are tastefully laid out and adorned; his nurseries, which cover about ten acres, contain many thousands of young fruit trees, particularly the Pear. For the last species of fruit his grounds are as distinguished as his greenhouses are for the best varieties and the most extensive collection of Camellias.

His library of well selected, rare and valuable works on his favorite arts of horticulture and agriculture, affords evidence of a well cultivated mind, and of a habit of thorough investigation and study.

Blessed by nature with quick perceptive faculties, and with unusual versatility of mind, he acquires with ease and rapidity; and being of a practical turn, he readily and and wisely appropriates his knowledge to his daily pursuits. He is a rigid economist of time, and a strict adherent to system. The early hour of morning he devotes to the planning of the labors of the day. This prepares him to give wise direction to the workmen when they are ready for their employments. After breakfast and family duties, he goes forth to see that each man is at his post, to drop a word of encouragement to the industrious and faithful, and by his own example to encourage and instruct them, now training a vine or giving a finishing touch to a boquet, then wielding the spade or the pruning knife; hybridizing a Camellia, planting a tree, inserting a bud, sketching a flower, or gathering the first fruit of a new variety of Pear for subsequent study, delineation, and description. At ten o'clock, or thereabout, he doffs his garden robes, and is attired - in his carriage -and on his way to Boston, where the remainder of the day is devoted to his mercantile business.