and so it happened that the only pleasures that I owe him, except the bringing me a few books when he came back from his business trips to New York to sell his machines, were those long walks in the face of nature.  He was, in his family, apparently a cold, hard man, but out of it, kindly and benevolent, melting always to distress which came in his way; with a passionate love of animals and of nature.  He was a poor business man, for he could never press for the payment of debts due to him, but his honesty was so rigid that it became a proverb in our town that a man should be “as honest as old Joe Stillman,” and that good name was all he gave or left his children.

My father died in one of my occasional absences in Europe, and when I saw my old mother in the black she never again laid off, she told me, tranquilly and with a firm voice, but with the tears running down her cheeks, how he died, and said, “He was so handsome that I wanted to keep him another day.”  The warmth of expression struck me strangely, for in all my home experience I had never heard before a word which could be taken as a token of conjugal tenderness, but when I reflected, I could see that it was and always had been the same with the children.  Of the nine children she bore, five died before she did, including her second and, during my life, her only daughter, but in all the bereavements she retained her calm, self-contained manner, weeping silently, and tranquilly going about the house, comforting those who shared the bereavement, uncomplaining, reconciled in advance; she had consigned her beloved to the God who gave them to her, and would have thought it rebellion to repine at any dispensation which He sent her.  In the most sudden and crushing grief I remember her to have experienced, that which came with the news that my brother Alfred had been killed by the explosion of a steamboat boiler at New Orleans, there was one brief break-down of her fortitude, an hour’s yielding, and then all her thought was for the widow and the children.  No detail of the household duties was neglected, and nothing was forgotten that concerned the comfort of others.  She avoided all external signs of grief, and, until my father died, she never wore mourning.  Her bereavements and her prayers were matters that concerned only God and herself.

What I have said might give her the character of an ascetic, but nothing could be further from her.  She was always optimistic as to earthly troubles, always cheerful and fond of mild festivities.  At times no one was more merry than she, and I have seen her laughing at a good joke or story till the tears ran down her cheeks.  Cheerfulness was to her a duty which was never violated except when she was laying her case before God.