“But while sensitive to the evils of society, he felt confident that all would be righted.  When he prayed, you could hear in the very tones of his voice the expectation that Christ Jesus would utterly demolish all iniquity, and fill the earth with His glory.  This Christian man was not a misanthrope, did not think that everything was going to ruin, considered the world a very good place to live in.  He never sat moping or despondent, but took things as they were, knowing that God could and would make them better.  When the heaviest surge of calamity came upon him, he met it with as cheerful a countenance as ever a bather at the beach met the incoming Atlantic, rising up on the other side of the wave stronger than when it smote him.  Without ever being charged with frivolity, he sang, and whistled, and laughed.  He knew about all the cheerful tunes that were ever printed in old ‘New Brunswick Collection,’ and the ‘Strum Way,’ and the sweetest melodies that Thomas Hastings ever composed.  I think that every pillar in the Somerville and Bound Brook churches knew his happy voice.  He took the pitch of sacred song on Sabbath morning, and lost it not through all the week.  I have heard him sing plowing amid the aggravations of a ’new ground,’ serving writs, examining deeds, going to arrest criminals, in the house and by the way, at the barn and in the street.  When the church choir would break down, everybody looked around to see if he were not ready with Woodstock, Mount Pisgah, or Uxbridge.  And when all his familiar tunes failed to express the joy of his soul, he would take up his own pen, draw five long lines across the sheet, put in the notes, and then to the tune that he called ‘Bound Brook’ begin to sing: 

  ’As when the weary trav’ler gains
  The height of some o’erlooking hill,
  His heart revives if, ’cross the plains,
  He eyes his home, tho’ distant still: 

  Thus, when the Christian pilgrim views,
  By faith, his mansion in the skies;
  The sight his fainting strength renews,
  And wings his speed to reach the prize.

  “’Tis there,” he says, “I am to dwell
  With Jesus in the realms of day: 
  There I shall bid my cares farewell,
  And he will wipe my tears away.”

“But few families fell heir to so large a pile of well-studied note-books.  He was ready, at proper times, for all kinds of innocent amusement.  He often felt a merriment that not only touched the lips, but played upon every fibre of the body, and rolled down into the very depths of his soul, with long reverberations.  No one that I ever knew understood more fully the science of a good laugh.  He was not only quick to recognize hilarity when created by others, but was always ready to do his share toward making it.  Before extreme old age, he could outrun and outleap any of his children.  He did not hide his satisfaction at having outwalked some one who boasted of his pedestrianism, or at having been able