How life may be made sweeter at its end,
How graces from the seasons that have fled
May light her eyes and added glory lend
To saintly aureole about her head.

We bring our Christmas greeting heartily,
Three generations gathered at her feet,
Who like a little child has led, while we
Have lived and loved beneath her influence sweet.

[Illustration:  THE STREET FRONTING THE SANBORN HOME AT HANOVER, N.H.]

Levi Parsons Morton, born at Shoreham, Vermont, May 16, 1824, was named for his mother’s brother, Levi Parsons, the first American missionary to Palestine.  He was the son of a minister, Reverend Daniel Morton, who with his wife Lucretia Parsons, like so many other clergymen, was obliged to exist on a starvation salary, only six hundred dollars a year.  Among his ancestors was George Morton of Battery, Yorkshire, financial agent in London of the Mayflower.  Mr. L.P.  Morton may have inherited his financial cleverness from this ancestor.

After studying at Shoreham Academy, he entered a country store at Enfield, Massachusetts, and was there for two years, then taught a district school, and later entered a general store at Concord, New Hampshire, when only seventeen.  His father was unable to send him to college, and Mr. Estabrook, the manager of the store, decided to establish him in a branch store at Hanover, New Hampshire, where Dartmouth College is located, giving him soon afterward an interest in the business.  Here he stayed until nearly twenty-four years old.  Mr. Morton immediately engaged a stylish tailor from Boston, W.H.  Gibbs, or as all called him, “Bill Gibbs,” whose skill at making even cheap suits look smart brought him a large patronage from the college students.  Once a whole graduating class were supplied with dress suits from this artist.  Mr. Morton had a most interesting store, sunny and scrupulously clean, with everything anyone could ask for, and few ever went out of it without buying something, even if they had entered simply from curiosity.  The clerks were trained to be courteous without being persistent.  Saturday was bargain day, and printed lists of what could be obtained on that day at an absurdly cheap rate were widely distributed through the neighbouring towns.  People came in large numbers to those bargains.  Long rows of all sorts of odd vehicles were hitched up and down the street.  A man would drop in for some smoking tobacco and buy himself a good straw hat or winter cap.  A wife would call because soda was offered so cheaply and would end by buying a black silk dress, “worth one dollar a yard but selling for today only for fifty cents.”  Mr. Morton was perhaps the original pioneer in methods which have built up the great department stores of the present day.  If he had received the education his father so craved for him he would have probably had an inferior and very different career.