warmed all hearts towards himself.  Notwithstanding the numerous calls upon his time, made by public and private business, he did not lose his sweet cheerfulness of temper, and was ever ready in his most busy moments to aid others, if he saw a possibility of so doing.”  Energy, gentleness, conscientiousness and courtesy were seldom, if ever, blended in such suave accord as in him.  These virtues came out, each in its distinctive lustre, under the trials and vexations which try human nature most severely.  All who knew him marvelled that he was able to maintain such sweetness and evenness of temper under provocations and difficulties which would have greatly annoyed most men.  What he was in these outer circles of his influence, he was, to all the centralization of his virtues, in the heart of his family.  Here, indeed, the best graces of his character had their full play and beauty.  He was the centre and soul of one of the happiest of earthly homes, attracting to him the affections of every member of the hearth circle that moved in the sleepless light of his life.  Here he did not rule, but led by love.  It alone dictated, and it alone obeyed.  It inspired its like in domestic discipline.  Spontaneous reverence for such a father’s wish and will superseded the unpleasant necessity of more active parental constraint.  To bring a shade of sadness to that venerated face, or a speechless reproach to that benignant eye, was a greater punishment to a temporarily wayward child than any corporal correction could have inflicted.

No one of the hundreds that were present at the sale and dispersion of the Babraham flock could have thought that the remaining days of the great and good man were to be so few on earth.  He was then about sixty-five years of age, of stately, unbending form and face radiant and genial with the florid flush of that Indian Summer which so many Englishmen wear late in those autumnal years that bend and pale American forms and faces to “the sere and yellow leaf” of life.  But the sequel proved that he did not abdicate his position too early.  In a little more than a year from this event, his spirit was raised to higher fellowships and folded with those of the pure and blest of bygone ages.  The incidents and coincidents of the last, great moments of his being here, were remarkable and affecting.  Neither he nor his wife died at the home they had made so happy with the beauty and savor of their virtues.  Under another and distant roof they both laid themselves down to die.  The husband’s hand was linked in his wife’s, up to within a few short steps of the river’s brink, when, touched with the cold spray of the dark waters, it fell from its hold and was superseded by the strong arm of the angel of the covenant, sent to bear her fast across the flood.  In life they were united to a oneness seldom witnessed on earth; in death they were not separated except by the thinnest partition.  Though her spirit was taken up first to the great and holy communion