to swing the scythe after all the rest of the harvesters had dropped from exhaustion, or at having, in legislative hall, tripped up some villainous scheme for robbing the public treasury.  We never had our ears boxed, as some children I wot of, for the sin of being happy.  In long winter nights it was hard to tell who enjoyed sportfulness the better, the children who romped the floor, or the parents who, with lighted countenance, looked at them.  Great indulgence and leniency characterized his family rule, but the remembrance of at least one correction more emphatic than pleasing proves that he was not like Eli of old, who had wayward sons and restrained them not.  In the multitude of his witticisms there were no flings at religion, no caricatures of good men, no trifling with things of eternity.  His laughter was not the ‘crackling of thorns under a pot,’ but the merry heart that doeth good like a medicine.  For this all the children of the community knew him; and to the last day of his walking out, when they saw him coming down the lane, shouted, ‘Here comes grandfather!’ No gall, no acerbity, no hypercriticism.  If there was a bright side to anything, he always saw it, and his name, in all the places where he dwelt, will long be a synonym for exhilaration of spirit.

“But whence this cheerfulness?  Some might ascribe it ail to natural disposition.  No doubt there is such a thing as sunshine of temperament.  God gives more brightness to the almond tree than to the cypress.  While the pool putrefies under the summer sun, God slips the rill off of the rocks with a frolicsomeness that fills the mountain with echo.  No doubt constitutional structure had much to do with this cheerfulness.  He had, by a life of sobriety, preserved his freshness and vigor.  You know that good habits are better than speaking tubes to the ear; better than a staff to the hand; better than lozenges to the throat; better than warm baths to the feet; better than bitters for the stomach.  His lips had not been polluted, nor his brain befogged, by the fumes of the noxious weed that has sapped the life of whole generations, sending even ministers of the Gospel to untimely graves, over which the tombstone declared, ’Sacrificed by overwork in the Lord’s vineyard,’ when if the marble had not lied, it would have said, ‘Killed by villainous tobacco!’ He abhorred anything that could intoxicate, being among the first in this country to join the crusade against alcoholic beverages.  When urged, during a severe sickness, to take some stimulus, he said, ‘No!  If I am to die, let me die sober!’ The swill of the brewery had never been poured around the roots of this thrifty almond.  To the last week of his life his ear could catch a child’s whisper, and at fourscore years his eyes refused spectacles, although he would sometimes have to hold the book off on the other side of the light, as octogenarians are wont to do.  No trembling of the hands, no rheum in the eyes, no knocking together of the knees,