Who that was there can ever forget it?  In my own memory that throng of the worthy, the beautiful, the gay of a great city will stand as the one fulfilment which Fate has given me of many Oriental promissory dreams, most of which she has failed to honor.  In that great company you might have traced all the circles of that city’s growth, as you may trace a tree’s history in its rings.  That lady there was the first white baby born here, where now over two hundred thousand human beings reside.  Here are the pioneers who filled the first log-huts on the city’s site, until they overflowed through the roofs.  And here is an inner circle of children, and an outer one of grandchildren, about the two who are the heart of this beautiful celebration.  Can that lovely, erect, blooming lady be a bride of fifty years?  Looking at her, one would say it is a great and unnecessary mistake of ours to grow old.  But more closely must we look at that quaint old man by her side.  Lately he has passed away; but every day of his long life left a trace worthy to be noted well.  His eighty years and twenty-five days of life comprise an epitome of the history and growth of a great community.  Not so would you at first interpret that plain old man; though, to a knowing eye, that eye, clear with looking at the duty that lies nearest, that mouth, telling of patient, unimpulsive energy, that broadness about the brow, would be guaranties of a marked life.

And now for my story, which you must let me tell in a rambling way; for any systematic biography of that man would be like putting one of his own Catawba-vines into your herbarium.

I introduce you to a fair-haired, handsome youth, on the deck of a small steamboat, which is bearing him to his fortune in the great West.  He is penniless.  His father was wealthy; but in the war he was a Tory, and, in the confiscation of his property, his sin was visited upon his son.  But he was not the boy to repine, with youth and the great West before him.  And now as from the steamer’s deck he sees a fine landscape with a few log-houses on it, he believes that it is one day to be a great city, and concludes to stop there.  So he is put ashore with his trunk.

He has already determined to study law.  He goes to the one judge who resides there, and is taken as a student into his office.  More log-houses are built; a court-house is erected; and presently that institution at sight of which the shipwrecked Englishman fell on his knees and thanked God he was in a Christian land—­the gallows—­made its appearance.  So the young man had a fair practice.