Vice-President Wilson, who were ready to discuss the conditions of the temperance reform which they had come to advocate.  Down in the dining-room the “Chi-Alpha” Society of distinguished ministers are holding their Saturday evening symposium; in the parlor my Irish guest, the Earl of Meath, is describing to me his philanthropies in London, and his Countess is describing her organization of “Ministering Children.”  In the library, Whittier is writing at the table; or Mr. Fulton is narrating his missionary work in China; out on the piazza my veteran neighbor, General Silas Casey, is telling the thrilling story of how he led our troops at the storming of the Heights of Chapultepec; up the steps comes dear old John G. Paton, with his patriarchal white beard, to say “good-bye,” before he goes back to his mission work in the New Hebrides.

No room in our dwelling is more sacred than the one in which I now write.  On its walls hang the portraits of my Princeton Professors, and those of majestic Chalmers and the gnarled brow of Hugh Miller, the Scotch geologist, the precious gifts of the author of “Rab and His Friend.”  Near them is the bright face of dear Henry Drummond, looking just as he did on that stormy evening when he came into my library a few hours after his arrival from Scotland.  I still recall his reply to me in Edinburgh, when I cautioned him against permitting his scientific studies to unspiritualize his activities.  “Never you fear,” said he, “I am too busy in trying to save young men; and the only way to do that is to lead them to the Lord Jesus Christ,” In former years this room was my beloved mother’s “Chamber of Peace” that opens to the sun-rising.  Her pictured face looks down upon me now from the wall, and her Bible lies beside me.  In this room we gathered on the afternoon of September 14, 1887, around her dying bed.  Her last words were:  “Now kiss me good night,” and in an hour or two she fell into that sweet slumber which Christ gives His beloved, at the ripe age of eighty-five.  Her mental powers and memory were unimpaired.  On the monument which covers her sleeping dust in Greenwood is engraved these words:  “Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.”

This room is also hallowed by another tenderly sacred association.  Here our beloved daughter, Louise Ledyard Cuyler, closed her beautiful life on the last day of September, 1881.  On her return from Narragansett Pier, she was stricken with a mysterious typhoid fever, which often lays its fatal touch on the most youthful and vigorous frame.  She had apparently passed the point of danger, and one Sabbath when I read to her that one hundred and twenty-first Psalm, which records the watchful love of Him who “never sleeps,” our hearts were gladdened with the prospect of a speedy recovery.  Then came on a fatal relapse; and in the early hour of dawn, while our breaking hearts were gathered around her dying bed, she had “another morn than ours.”