y
years, but said his age was fifty, I think he did not know--quivered
with emotion, as he said:

"Thank yer, mam, thank yer kindly, I'll tote a load forty miles for ye
any day, and I kin tote pretty 'harbaneous' loads too."

"Never mind that, Mr. Jones, I like to see you comfortable."

"Strange talk, mam," he said; "these yere ole ears been more used to,
'git up thar, yer lazy nigger, this yere cottin mus be got into de
market.'"

He proved a valuable acquisition to my father, and before this month of
February, whose beginning brought him to us, had passed, father said to
mother:

"I hardly see how I could get on without Matthias. He is so trusty, and
he is smart too. If the poor fellow had been given half a chance, he
would have made a good business man, for he has good ideas as to
bringing things around in season."

"Truth is stranger than fiction," said mother. "Two classes of society
have been perfectly represented in those who have been brought to us
during this last year."

"How strangely things work, and there seem to be ways under them all
that will work out in spite of us," said father.

The Sabbath on which we had expected to go to hear the Reverend Hosea
Ballou preach proved cold and rainy, and a month would elapse ere he
came again. We were impatient waiters, but the time came at last, on the
Sabbath after the arrival of Matthias, and he was to come over and
attend to the early milking, while Hal and Mr. Benton would have supper
ready for us on our return.

That day was to me like a never-to-be-forgotten sunrise. Although gleams
of light had before this crossed my vision, never had so radiant a
morning of perception opened the door of my soul. New yet old, unknown
yet longed for, those words fell like golden sun-rays into the room of
my understanding; they bathed me with light, and baptized me with
tenderness, while I stood at the fount of living inspiration. That grand
old man, then about seventy-two years of age, talked to the assembled
congregation from this text: "For we know that if our earthly house of
this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God; an house not
made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (Second Corinthians, fifth
chapter and first verse). It was all as natural as a part of himself
could be, and he was a power. Pure and dispassionate, the plea he made
rested on the ground of revealed truth. He told us of what the history
of the past furnished, and carried us clear