did. And yet before the morning dawned the child had found a brighter

world. This was a double sorrow because I had given him up and then taken him back again. Then came the sudden wrench.

“It was in March, and there had just come up a great storm, and all the ground was covered with snow.

“We went down to the graveyard with little Georgie, and waded through it in the snow. I got out of the carriage, and took the little coffin in my arms, and walked knee-deep to the side of the grave, and looking in I saw the winter down at the very bottom of it. The coffin was lowered to its place, and I saw the snowflakes follow it and cover it, and then the earth hid it from the winter.

“If I should live a thousand years I could not help shivering every time I thought of it. It seemed to me then as though I had not only lost my child, but buried him in eternal snows. It was very hard for faith or imagination to break through the physical aspect of things and find a brighter feeling.”

The attachment which his people felt for him was more than reciprocated. He always loved to recall these early years and in memory live over again their joys and sorrows, their struggles and triumphs.

In the early winter of 1877, in the course of a Western lecture trip, revisiting Indianapolis, he wrote back:

“I went to Indianapolis in the fall of 1849 with a sick babe in my arms, who showed the first symptoms of recovery after eating blackberries which I gathered by the way. The city had then a population of four thousand. At no time during my residence did it outreach five thousand. Behold it to-day with one hundred and ten thousand inhabitants! The Great National Road, which at that time was of great importance, since sunk into forgetfulness, ran through the city and constituted the main street. With the exception of two or three streets there were no ways along which could not be seen the original stumps of the forest. I bumped against them in a buggy too often not to be assured of the fact.

“Here I preached my first _real_ sermon; here, for the first time, I strove against death in behalf of a child, and was defeated; here I built a house and painted it with my own hands; here I had my first garden and became the bishop of flowers for this diocese; here I first joined the editorial fraternity and edited the _Farmer and Gardener_; here I had my first full taste of chills and fever; here for the first and last time I waded to church ankle-deep in mud and preached with pantaloons tucked into my boot-tops. All is changed now.

“In searching for my obscure little ten-foot cottage I got lost. So changed was everything that I groped over familiar territory like a blind man in a strange city. It is no longer _my_ Indianapolis, with the aboriginal forest fringing the town, with pasture-fields lying right across from my house; without coal, without railroads, without a stone big enough to throw at a cat. It was a joyful day and a precious gift when Calvin Fletcher allowed me to take from the fragments of stone used to make foundations for the State Bank a piece large enough to put in my pork-barrel. I left Indianapolis for Brooklyn on the very day upon which the cars on the Madison Railroad for the first time entered the town; and I departed on the first train that ever left the place. On a wood-car, rigged up with boards across from side to side, went I forth.

“It is now a mighty city, full of foundries, manufactories, wholesale stores, a magnificent court-house, beautiful dwellings, noble churches, wide and fine streets, and railroads more than I can name radiating to every point of the compass.

“The old academy where I preached for a few months is gone, but the church into which the congregation soon entered still is standing on the Governor’s Circle. No one can look upon that building as I do. A father goes back to his first house, though it be but a cabin, where his children were born, with feelings which can never be transferred to any other place. As I looked long and yearningly upon that homely building the old time came back again. I stood in the crowded lecture-room as on the night when the current of religious feeling first was beginning to flow! Talk of a young mother’s feelings over her first babe—what is that compared with the solemnity, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity of gratitude, of humility, of singing gladness, with which a young pastor greets the incoming of his first revival? He stands upon the shore to see the tide come in! It is the movement of the infinite, ethereal tide! It is from the other world! There is no color like heart color. The homeliest things dipped in that for ever after glow with celestial hues. The hymns that we sang in sorrow or in joy and triumph in that humble basement have never lost a feather, but fly back and forth between the soul and heaven, plumed as never was any bird-of-paradise.

“I stood and looked at the homely old building, and saw a procession of forms going in and out that the outward eye will never see again—Judge Morris, Samuel Merril, Oliver H. Smith, D. V. Cully, John L. Ketcham, Coburn, Fletcher, Bates, Bullard, Munsel, Ackley, O’Neil, and many, many more! There have been hours when there was not a hand-breadth between us and the saintly host in the invisible church! In the heat and pressure of later years the memories of those early days have been laid aside, but not effaced. They rise as I stand, and move in a gentle procession before me. No outward history is comparable to the soul’s inward life; of the soul’s inward life no part is so sublime as its eminent religious developments. And the pastor, who walks with men, delivering them from thrall, aspersing their sorrow with tears, kindling his own heart as a torch to light the way for those who would see the invisible, has, of all men, the most transcendent heart-histories. I have seen much of life since I trod that threshold for the last time; but nothing has dimmed my love, nor has any later or riper experience taken away the bloom and sanctity of my early love. And I can truly say of hundreds: ‘_For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel._’

“But other incidents arise—the days of sickness, chills and fever, the gardening days, my first editorial experience, my luck in horses and pigs, my house-building; and not a few scrapes—being stalled in mud, half-drowned in crossing rivers, long, lonely forest rides, camp-meetings, preachings in cabins, sleepings in the open air.

“I was reminded of one comical experience as I was seeking on Market Street to find the old swale or shallow ravine which ran between my cottage and Mr. Bates’s dwelling. It had formerly been a kind of bayou in spring when the stream above town overflowed, but dried off in summer. To redeem it from unhealth a dike had been built to restrain the river and turn the superfluous freshets another way. But one year the levee gave way in the night; and when the morning rose, behold a flood between me and my neighbor! There was sport on hand! It was too deep for wading, but I could extemporize a boat. I brought down to the edge my wife’s large washing-tub, and intended with a bit of board to paddle about. No sooner was I in than I was out. The tub refused to stand on its own bottom. Well, well, said I, two tubs are better than one. So I got its mate, and, nailing two strips across to hold them fast together, I was sure that they were too long now to upset. So they were, in the long line; but sideways they went over, carrying me with them with incredible celerity. Tubs were one thing, boats another—that I saw plainly.

“I would not be baffled. I proposed a raft. Getting rails from the fence, I soon had tacked boards across—enough of them to carry my weight. Then, with a long pole, I began my voyage. Alas! it came to a ludicrous end.

“A rail fence ran across this ravine in the field, just above the street. One end of the fence had loosened, and the water had floated it round enough to break its connection with its hither side. A large but young dog belonging to a friend had walked along the fence, hoping to cross dry-footed, till he came to the abrupt termination, and, his courage failing him, he had crouched down and lay trembling and whining, afraid to go back or to venture the water. I poled my raft up to the rescue; and, getting alongside, coaxed him to jump aboard, but his courage was all gone. He looked up wistfully, but stirred not. ‘Well, you coward, you _shall_ come aboard.’ Seizing him by the skin of the neck, I hauled him on to the raft, which instantly began to sink. It was buoyant enough for a man, but not for a man and a lubberly dog. There was nothing for it—as the stupid thing would not stir, I had to; and with a spring I reached the fence just abdicated by the dog, while he, the raft now coming to the surface again, went sailing down the pond and was safely landed below, while I was left in the crotch of the fence. One such experiment ought to serve for a life-time, but alas!

“There is no end of things gone by. They rise at every point; and one walks encompassed with memories which accompany him through the living streets like invisible spirits.”