Among all the guests there was none to whom I was more closely and lovingly drawn than to Bishop Gilbert Haven.  None shed off such splendid scintillations in our evening colloquies on the piazzas.  Haven was not comparable with his associate, Bishop Simpson, in pulpit oratory, for he was rarely an effective public speaker on any occasion, but in brilliancy of thought, which made him in conversation like the charge of an electric battery, and in brilliancy of pen, that kindled everything it touched, he was without a rival in the Methodist Church—­or almost in any other church in the land.  Consistently and conscientiously a radical, he always took extreme ground on such questions as negro rights, female suffrage, and liquor prohibition, and he never retreated.  Underneath all this impulsive and impetuous radicalism he was thoroughly old-fashioned and orthodox in his theology—­as far from Calvinism as any Wesleyan usually is.  He did delight in the doctrines of grace with his whole heart, and it is all the more grateful to me, as a Presbyterian, to pay this honest tribute to his deeply devout and Christ-like character.  I knew him when he was a student in the Wesleyan University at Middletown—­somewhat rustic in his ways, but a bold, bright youth hungry for knowledge.  In 1862 he published a series of foreign letters in the New York Independent, which Horace Greeley told me he regarded as most remarkable productions.  During the summer of that year I was watching the sun rise from the summit of the Righi in Switzerland, and was accosted by a sandy-haired man in an old oilcloth overcoat who asked for some explanation about the mountain within our view.  At the foot of the Righi I fell in with him again, and was struck with his original and vigorous thought.  The same evening he marched into my room at the “Schweitzer-Hoff,” dripping with the rain, and introduced himself as “Gilbert Haven.”  We ministered to the few Americans whom we could find in Lucerne, and held a prayer meeting on the Sabbath evening in Haven’s room for our far-away country in her dark hour of distress.  On that evening began a friendship which waxed warmer and warmer until death sundered the tie for a little while; the same hand that sundered can reunite us.

I am under a strong temptation to give my reminiscences of many notable persons whom I was wont to meet at Saratoga, such as the urbane ex-President Martin Van Buren, and that noble Christian statesman, Vice-President Henry Wilson, and the cheery old poet John Pierpont, and the erudite Horatio B. Hackett, of Newton Theological Seminary and the level-headed Miss Catherine E. Beecher, and the gifted Queen of the great temperance sisterhood, Miss Frances E. Willard, and General Batcheler, the able American Judge, at Cairo, and that extraordinary combination of courage, orthodox faith, and brilliant platform eloquence the late Joseph Cook, of Ticonderoga.  I would like also to attempt a description of the