It is more in accord with the promptings of my heart to speak a few words suggested by intimacy and long acquaintance with Dr. Powell.  Many learned to respect and honor him through the abundance of his labors in the broad field to which God in his providence called him for service.  But there is another side to that life, private, personal, even more attractive and richly suggestive to those who knew him best and were permitted to enjoy his friendship.

Our brother did not possess the conventional qualities which sometimes are associated with the “cloth.”  He was without that endless gravity which could almost fittingly grace a pedestal.  That pious deacon who had not “snickered” for above forty years, would have found his moral sensitiveness somewhat disturbed by the free, untrammelled way in which he spoke and acted.  There was no monotony in his make-up.  He was natural—­natural as devoid of all cant and affected airs.  When you met him, you had not come upon some person trumped for the occasion; it was Powell, the very man you wanted to see.  He could not be anything but himself.  Genuineness and unaffected simplicity were revealed in him, as in few others.  He could be as serious as a country judge; but he was serious because the matter was in him, and it was the hour for seriousness.  He could be as playful as a child, but it was because the play was in him and it was time for play.  When our brother was pastor of the North Church, in Newburyport, it was our custom to meet every Monday morning in Boston.  On one occasion, a brother-in-law of mine, a boy in his teens, accompanied me to Boston, where we were to meet Mr. Powell.  We soon found ourselves tramping about the city on errands.  Mr. Powell was effervescing with fun.  At such seasons, and they were very frequent, he took great pleasure in making me the victim of his frolicsomeness.  On this occasion, I found that Mr. Powell had enlisted the boy in the scheme of hiding away from me every chance they could get.  Passing through a crowd, I would look around and discover that they had absconded; and then it devolved on me to hunt them up, I never shall forget how this manoeuvering interested that boy.  He came up to me and whispered the first opportunity he had, “He is the funniest minister that I ever saw in my life.”  That was his first visit with Mr. Powell, but it was not the last.  On that day an attachment was formed which has lasted through all these years.  A little boy, four years old, in Oak Park, where Mr. Powell resided for some time, was asked by his father, what he wanted to do when he got to be a man, and answered:  “Be a minister and go hunting like Mr. Powell.”  He was a man for the boys.  He touched a responsive chord in their nature.  He could enjoy what they enjoyed with as keen a relish as they themselves.