and in this fashion
which shames my speech. For our words float away on the summer winds, to
be caught, it may be, and set in type and read by those who care for
such things, and then to die and be forgotten; but this your friend and
mine has done in Spencer will be eloquent with the silence which is
golden, and still tell its tale when we are all dead and dust who gather
here to-day. It is a poor and scant manhood which does not long now and
then to be remembered some little while after the grass grows green and
the daisies bloom on the grave. To have them speak of us at the
fire-side and in the workshop and the market, remembering what was
worthy in us and forgetting what was base, though there may be no more
to tell by comparison than Dr. Ripley told down in Concord, as he stood
by the dust of a man in his own town, and being sorely troubled to find
some real worth in the man's life he could dwell on for a moment, said,
"He was the best man I ever knew at a fire." I cannot even guess whether
Richard Sugden ever thought of this as one of the rewards which must
return to him for his gift to Spencer, and I love to think that to his
generous heart the work was its own reward. But I say, as we stand here
on this day of gift and dedication, that if this had been his sole
purpose, to be held in grateful remembrance of his fellow-townsmen and
their children through centuries of time, then he has taken out an
insurance that will stand good always and keep his memory green in the
town of Spencer. And not here alone, but far away across the sea in old
Yorkshire, where his home was in the old time before he came to this new
world to seek his fortune, and, far more and better than that, to earn
it honestly and well. The story will be told there long after to-day and
to-morrow, how one of the Sugdens who went out from among them gave this
gift, and then the kith and kin will hold up their heads and feel that
the fine old name has won still another patent of nobility. A poor youth
he was in the narrow, contracted, dear old land, where the poor were
held by a cruel bit. And a voice came to him, saying, "Get thee out from
thy kindred and thy father's house unto a land that I will tell thee
of"; and he followed the voice, as I did also, to the promised land;
carved out his fortune honest and fair, I say, but then could not be
content to enrich his own family alone, or, as so many do, to remember
his town in his will. He must build this