say that I don’t like you.”  “Well,” I said, “that is a strange coincidence, for I cannot bear the sight of you.  I hear that you are the meanest man in town, and that your neighbours despise you.  I hear that you wheeled your wife on a wheelbarrow to the graveyard.”  To say the least, our conversation that day was unique and spirited, and it led to his becoming a most ardent friend and admirer.  I have had multitudes of friends, but I have found in my own experience that God so arranged it that the greatest opportunities of usefulness that have been opened before me were opened by enemies.  And when, years ago, they conspired against me, their assault opened all Christendom to me as a field in which to preach the Gospel.  So you may harness your antagonists to your best interests and compel them to draw you on to better work.  He allowed me to officiate at his second marriage, did this mine enemy.  All the town was awake that night.  They had somehow heard that this economist at obsequies was to be remarried.  Well, I was inside his house trying, under adverse circumstances, to make the twain one flesh.  There were outside demonstrations most extraordinary, and all in consideration of what the bridegroom had been to that community.  Horns, trumpets, accordions, fiddles, fire-crackers, tin pans, howls, screeches, huzzas, halloos, missiles striking the front door, and bedlam let loose!  Matters grew worse as the night advanced, until the town authorities read the Riot Act, and caused the only cannon belonging to the village to be hauled out on the street and loaded, threatening death to the mob if they did not disperse.  Glad am I to say that it was only a farce, and no tragedy.  My mode of first meeting this queer man was a case in which it is best to fight fire with fire.  I remember also the first funeral.  It nearly killed me.  A splendid young man skating on the Passaic River in front of my house had broken through the ice, and his body after many hours had been grappled from the water and taken home to his distracted parents.  To be the chief consoler in such a calamity was something for which I felt completely incompetent.  When in the old but beautiful church the silent form of the young man whom we all loved rested beneath the pulpit, it was a pull upon my emotions I shall never forget.  On the way to the grave, in the same carriage with the eminent Reverend Dr. Fish, who helped in the services, I said, “This is awful.  One more funeral like this will be the end of us.”  He replied, “You will learn after awhile to be calm under such circumstances.  You cannot console others unless you preserve your own equipoise.”

Those years at Belleville were to me memorable.  No vacation, but three times a day I took a row on the river.  Those old families in my congregation I can never forget—­the Van Rensselaers, the Stevenses, the Wards.  These families took us under their wing.  At Mr. Van Rensselaer’s we dined every Monday.  It had been the habit of my predecessors in the pulpit.  Grand old family!  Their name not more a synonym for wealth than for piety.  Mrs. Van Rensselaer was one of the saints clear up in the heaven of one’s appreciation.