When he had built his new home near the Hudson, Robert Collier and I visited him.  We found in the rear of an addition that clap-boards had been put up in all sorts of adjustment.  Mr. Collier asked him:  “Where did you find a carpenter to do such poor work as that?” and Mr. Beecher said humorously:  “You could not hire that carpenter on your house.”  Then he said:  “Mr. Collier, I put those boards on that house myself.  I insisted that they leave that work for me to do.  I have been happy putting on these boards and driving these nails.  They took me back to the old days at Lawrenceville, where we lived over a store and our pantry was a dry goods box.  But there we were so happy.  I am hoping sometime to be as happy again, but it is not possible to do it while I am in the service of the public.”  He had promised himself and his wife some day to go back to that simple life.  But his sudden death taught the same great lesson with all the examples I give of great men and women.  Rev. Robt.  Collier always enjoyed the circus—­the circus was the great place of enjoyment outside, perhaps, of his pulpit work.  It was Robert Collier who used to tell the story of the boy whose aunt always made him go to church, but after going to a circus he wrote to his aunt:  “Auntie, if you had ever been to a circus, you wouldn’t go to another prayer-meeting as long as you live.”  The love of Collier for the circus only shows the simplicity of the great man’s mind.  Mr. Collier is said to have paid a dollar for a fifty cent ticket to the circus, only making it conditional that he was to have the privilege of going ’round to the rear and crawling under the tent, showing what he must have done when a boy.  The fact of Mr. Collier’s love for the circus was one of the strange things in the eccentricities of a great man’s life.  Once Mr. Barnum came into Mr. Collier’s church and Mr. Collier said to the usher:  “Please show Mr. Barnum to a front seat for he always gives me one in his circus.”  These simplicities often show that somewhere back in each man’s life there is a point where happiness and love are one, and when, that point is passed, we go on longing to the return.

The night after he went to hear Henry Ward Beecher’s great sermon they persuaded us to stay until the following Monday night, because there was to be a lecture at the Cooper Institute and there was to be a parade of political clubs, and fire works, so as country boys, easily influenced, we decided that the school could wait for another day, and staid for the procession.  We went to Cooper’s Institute and there was a crowd as there was at Beecher’s church.  We finally got on the stairway and far in the rear of the great crowd, but my brother stood on the floor, and I sat on the ledge of the window sill, with my feet on his shoulders, so he held me while I told him down there what was going on over yonder.  The first man that came on the platform, and presided at that meeting, was William Cullent Bryant, our dear