unintelligible to strangers, so wild and awkward a manner of behaviour, that he is frequently taken for an idiot, and seems in many things to be indeed so;—­the other, that he grew up to manhood in a very licentious course of living, and an entire ignorance of divine things, so that all these exact impressions on his memory have been made in his riper years.  I thought it would not be disagreeable to the colonel to introduce to him this odd phenomenon, which many hundreds of people have had a curiosity to examine; and, among all the strange things I have seen in him, I never remember any that equalled what passed on this occasion.  On hearing the colonel’s profession, and receiving some hints of his religious character, he ran through a vast variety of scriptures, beginning at the Pentateuch and going on to the Revelation, relating either to the dependence to be fixed on God for the success of military preparations, or to the instances and promises occurring there for his care of good men in the most imminent dangers, or to the encouragement to despise perils and death, while engaged in a good cause, and supported by the views of a happy immortality.  I believe he quoted more than twenty of these passages, and I must freely own that I know not who could have chosen them with greater propriety.  If my memory deceive me not, the last of this catalogue was that from which I afterwards preached, on the lamented occasion of this great man’s fall:  “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”  We were all astonished at so remarkable a feat, and I question not but many of my readers will think the memory of it worthy of being thus preserved.

But to return to my main subject:  The day after the sermon and conversation of which I have been speaking, I took my best leave of my inestimable friend, after attending him some part of his way northward.  The first stage of our journey was to the cottage of that poor but religious family which I had before occasion to mention as relieved, and indeed in a great measure subsisted by his charity.  Nothing could be more delightful than to observe the condescension with which he conversed with these his humble pensioners.  We there put up our last united prayers together; and he afterwards expressed, in the strongest terms I have ever heard him use on such an occasion, the singular pleasure with which he had joined in them.  Indeed it was no small satisfaction to me to have an opportunity of recommending such a valuable friend to the divine protection and blessing, with that particular freedom and enlargement on what was peculiar in his circumstances, which hardly any other situation, unless we had been quite alone, could so conveniently have admitted.  We went from thence to the table of a person of distinction in the neighborhood, where he had an opportunity of showing in how decent and graceful a manner he could unite the Christian and the gentleman, and give conversation an improving and religious turn, without violating any of the rules of polite behaviour, or saying or doing any thing, which looked at all constrained or affected.  Here we took our last embrace, committing each other to the care of the God of heaven; and the colonel pursued his journey to the north, where he spent the remainder of his days.