Ours was an industrious home.  I was brought up to regard laziness as an abominable disease.  Though we were some years of age before we heard the trill of a piano, we knew well all about the song of “The Spinning-Wheel.”

Through how many thrilling scenes my father had passed!  He stood, at Morristown, in the choir that chanted when George Washington was buried; talked with young men whose fathers he had held on his knee; watched the progress of John Adams’s administration; denounced, at the time, Aaron Burr’s infamy; heard the guns that celebrated the New Orleans victory; voted against Jackson, but lived long enough to wish we had another just like him; remembered when the first steamer struck the North river with its wheel-buckets; was startled by the birth of telegraphy; saw the United States grow from a speck on the world’s map till all nations dip their flag at our passing merchantmen.  He was born while the Revolutionary cannon were coming home from Yorktown, and lived to hear the tramp of troops returning from the war of the great Rebellion.  He lived to speak the names of eighty children, grand-children and great-grand-children.  He died just three years from the day when my mother sped on.

When my father lay dying the old country minister said to him, “Mr. Talmage, how do you feel now as you are about to pass the Jordan of death?” He replied—­and it was the last thing he ever said—­“I feel well; I feel very well; all is well”—­lifting his hand in a benediction, a speechless benediction, which I pray God may go down through all the generations—­“It is well!”

Four of his sons became ministers of the Gospel:  Reverend James R. Talmage, D.D., who was preaching before I was born, and who died in 1879; Reverend John Van Nest Talmage, D.D., who spent his life as a missionary in China, and died in the summer of 1892; Reverend Goyn Talmage, D.D., who after doing a great work for God, died in 1891.  But all my brothers and sisters were decidedly Christian, lived usefully and died peacefully.

I rejoice to remember that though my father lived in a plain house the most of his days, he died in a mansion provided by the filial piety of his son who had achieved a fortune.

The house at Gateville, near Bound Brook, in which I was born, has gone down.  Not one stone has been left upon another.  I one day picked up a fragment of the chimney, or wall, and carried it home.  But the home that I associate with my childhood was about three miles from Somerville, N.J.  The house, the waggon-shed, the barn, are now just as I remember them from childhood days.  It was called “Uncle John’s Place” from the fact that my mother’s uncle, John Van Nest, owned it, and from him my father rented it “on shares.”  Here I rode the horse to brook.  Here I hunted for and captured Easter eggs.  Here the natural world made its deepest impression on me.  Here I learned some of the fatigues and hardships of the farmer’s