“But a deeper shadow fell across the old home-stead.  The ‘Golden Wedding’ had been celebrated nine years before.  My mother looked up, pushed back her spectacles, and said, ’Just think of it, father!  We have been together fifty-nine years!’ The twain stood together like two trees of the forest with interlocked branches.  Their affections had taken deep root together in many a kindred grave.  Side by side in life’s great battle, they had fought the good fight and won the day.  But death comes to unjoint this alliance.  God will not any longer let her suffer mortal ailments.  The reward of righteousness is ready, and it must be paid.  But what a tearing apart!  What rending up!  What will the aged man do without this other to lean on?  Who can so well understand how to sympathize and counsel?  What voice so cheering as hers, to conduct him down the steep of old age?  ‘Oh’ said she in her last moments, ’father, if you and I could only be together, how pleasant it would be!’ But the hush of death came down one autumnal afternoon, and for the first time in all my life, on my arrival at home, I received no maternal greeting, no answer of the lips, no pressure of the hand.  God had taken her.

“In this overwhelming shock the patriarch stood confident, reciting the promises and attesting the Divine goodness.  O, sirs, that was faith, faith, faith!  ‘Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory!’

“Finally, I noticed that in my father’s old age was to be seen the beauty of Christian activity.  He had not retired from the field.  He had been busy so long you could not expect him idle now.  The faith I have described was not an idle expectation that sits with its hands in its pockets idly waiting, but a feeling which gathers up all the resources of the soul, and hurls them upon one grand design.  He was among the first who toiled in Sabbath-schools, and never failed to speak the praise of these institutions.  No storm or darkness ever kept him away from prayer-meeting.  In the neighborhood where he lived for years held a devotional meeting.  Oftentimes the only praying man present, before a handful of attendants, he would give out the hymn, read the lines, conduct the music, and pray.  Then read the Scriptures and pray again.  Then lead forth in the Doxology with an enthusiasm as if there were a thousand people present, and all the church members had been doing their duty.  He went forth visiting the sick, burying the dead, collecting alms for the poor, inviting the ministers of religion to his household, in which there was, as in the house of Shunem, a little room over the wall, with bed and candlestick for any passing Elisha.  He never shuddered at the sight of a subscription paper, and not a single great cause of benevolence has arisen within the last half century which he did not bless with his beneficence.  Oh, this was not a barren almond tree that blossomed.  His charity was not like the bursting of the bud of a famous tree in the