uncharitableness.  His heart was so broad and loving that he seemed to have room in it for the whole world; and his greeting of strangers on an Australian platform, amid the heathers of Scotland, or in the Golden Gate of California, was so free and cordial that each one might have thought himself a dear friend of the Doctor, and he would have been right in thinking so.  Again, his sense of humour was so great that he could laugh and “poke fun” at his critics with such ease and good humour that their arrows passed harmlessly over his head.  “Men have a right to their opinions,” he would genially say.  “There are twenty tall pippin trees in the orchard to one crab apple tree.  There are a million clover blooms to one thistle in the meadow.”

His will power was extraordinary; it was endowed with a persistence that overcame every obstacle of his life; there was an air of supreme confidence, of overwhelming vitality, about his every act.  Nothing seemed to me more wonderful in him than this; and it entered into all his actions, from those that were important and far-reaching in their consequences to the workings of his daily life in the home.  Though his way through these last milestones, during which I travelled with him, was chiefly through the triumphal archways he had raised for himself upon the foundations of his work, there were indications that their cornerstone was the will power of his nature.

Many incidents of the years before I knew him justify this opinion.  One in particular illustrates the extraordinary perseverance of Dr. Talmage’s character.  When his son DeWitt was a boy, in a sudden mood of adventure one day, he enlisted in the United States Navy.  Shortly afterwards he regretted having done so.  Some one went to his father and told him that the boy was on board a warship at Hampton Roads, homesick and miserable.  Dr. Talmage went directly to Washington, straight into the office of Mr. Thompson, the Secretary of the Navy.  “I am Dr. Talmage,” he said promptly; “my son has enlisted in the Navy and is on a ship near Norfolk.  I want to go to him and bring him home.  He is homesick.  Will you write me an order for his release?” The Secretary replied that it had become an impression among rich men’s sons that they could take an oath of service to the U.S.  Government, and break it as soon as their fathers were ready, through the influence of wealth, to secure their release.  He was opposed to such an idea, he said; and, therefore, though he was very sorry, he could not grant Dr. Talmage’s request.  The Doctor immediately took a chair in the office, and said firmly:  “I shall not leave this office, Mr. Secretary, until you write out an order releasing my son.”