The summer of 1887 opened the baseball season of America, and I
deplored an element of roughness and loaferism that attached itself to
the greatest game of our country. One of the national events of this
season of that year was a proposal to remove the battle-flag of the late
war. Good sense prevailed, and the controversy was satisfactorily
settled; otherwise the whole country would have been aflame. It was not
merely an agitation over a few bits of bunting. The most arousing,
thrilling, blood-stirring thing on earth is a battle-flag. Better let
the old battle-flags of our three wars hang where they are. Only one
circumstance could disturb them, and that would be the invasion of a
foreign power and the downfall of the Republic. The strongest passions
of men are those of patriotism.

The best things that a man does in the world usually take a lifetime to
make. A career is a life job, and no one is sure whether it was worthy
or not till it is over. I except doctors from this rule, of whom Homer
says:--

A wise physician skilled our wounds to heal
Is more than armies to the public weal.

Some may remember the stalwart figure of Dr. Joseph Hutchinson, one of
the best American surgeons. For some years, in the streets of Brooklyn,
he was a familiar and impressive figure on horseback. He rode superbly,
and it was his custom to make his calls in that way. He died in this
year. Daniel Curry was another significant, superior man of a different
sort, who also died in the summer of 1887. He was an editor and writer
of the Methodist Church. At his death he told one thing that will go
into the classics of the Church; and five hundred years beyond, when
evangelists quote the last words of this inspired man, they will recall