his unusual age that this text seems
to me appropriate for the funeral of our friend. His years
were but little more than threescore and ten, and his step
was light, and his heart was young, and we hardly thought of
him as an old man. Nor is it because his work seemed to us
completed, that we think of the measure of his days as
satisfied. His facile pen dropped upon a new page; and
before him, as he ceased to labor, were tasks midway, and
others just begun. It is because our first feeling is so
unsatisfied, it is because there was so much more which he
wished, and we wished him to do, and that we are constrained
to measure the length of his life, and to find, if we may
find, in spite of this sudden break in our hopes and his
plans, a completion that can satisfy. Measured by its
experiences and accomplishments, it may seem to us that this
life, so abruptly terminated, was one whose length and
symmetry well deserve to be considered a fulfilment of the
promise of the text."

Following the prayer, Dr. Barton said:

"It was the purpose of our organist, Mr. Dunham, a true and
honored friend of Mr. Coffin, to play, as the postlude to
this service, the stateliest of funeral marches, but I
dissuaded him. This is a Christian funeral. Our music is not
a dirge, but a jubilate. The hope of our friend in life is
ours for him in death. Instead of even the noblest funeral
march expressing our own grief, there will be played the
most triumphant of anthems, expressing his own victory over
death,--Handel's matchless 'Hallelujah Chorus.'"

The organ then played the "Hallelujah Chorus," and the
benediction was pronounced by Dr. Barton.

It had been intended to deposit the mortal relics of Carleton in the
ancestral cemetery at Webster, N. H., the village next to Boscawen,
but Providence interposed. After all preparations for travel and
transportation had been made, heavy rains fell, which washed away
bridges and so disturbed the ordinary condition of the roads in New
Hampshire that the body had to be deposited in a vault at Brookline
until a more convenient season for interment. Meanwhile, the soldiers
of the Grand Army, adult friends, and even children, united in the
wish that the grave of their friend and helper might be within easy
reach of Boston, so that on the National Memorial Day, and