in the choir that chanted when George Washington was buried; talked with
young men whose grandfathers he had held on his knee; watched the progress
of John Adams' administration; denounced, at the time, Aaron Burr's infamy;
heard the guns that celebrated the New Orleans victory; voted against
Jackson, but lived long enough to wish we had one just like him; remembered
when the first steamer struck the North River with it's wheel buckets;
flushed with excitement in the time of national banks and sub-treasury; was
startled at the birth of telegraphy; saw the United States grow from a
speck on the world's map till all nations dip their flag at our passing
merchantmen, and our 'national airs' have been heard on the steeps of the
Himalayas; was born while the Revolutionary cannon were coming home from
Yorktown, and lived to hear the tramp of troops returning from the war of
the great Rebellion; lived to speak the names of eighty children,
grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Nearly all his contemporaries
gone! Aged Wilberforce said that sailors drink to 'friends astern' until
halfway over the sea, and then drink to 'friends ahead.' So, also, with my
father. Long and varied pilgrimage! Nothing but sovereign grace could
have kept him true, earnest, useful, and Christian through so many exciting
scenes.

"He worked unwearily from the sunrise of youth, to the sunset of old age,
and then in the sweet nightfall of death, lighted by the starry promises,
went home, taking his sheaves with him. Mounting from earthly to heavenly
service, I doubt not there were a great multitude that thronged heaven's
gate to hail him into the skies,--those whose sorrows he had appeased,
whose burdens he had lifted, whose guilty souls he had pointed to a
pardoning God, whose dying moments he had cheered, whose ascending spirits
he had helped up on the wings of sacred music. I should like to have heard
that long, loud, triumphant shout of heaven's welcome. I think that the
harps throbbed with another thrill, and the hills quaked with a mightier