c meeting addressing them on some important
topic. He never appeared to have a sense of difference from or
superiority over his fellowmen, but only the keenest sympathy with all
things human. Every man was his brother, every human being honest. A cow
or a horse was as much to be treated with sympathy and charity as a man
or a woman. If a purse was lost, forty-nine out of every fifty men would
return it without thought of reward, if you were to believe him.

In the little town where he had lived so many years, and where he
finally died, he knew every living creature from cattle upwards, and
could call each by name. The sick, the poor, the widows, the orphans,
the insane, and dependents of all kinds, were his especial care. Every
Sunday afternoon for years, it was his custom to go the rounds of the
indigent, frequently carrying a basket of his good wife's dinner. This
he distributed, along with consolation and advice. Occasionally he would
return home of a winter's day very much engrossed with the discovery of
some condition of distress hitherto unseen.

"Mother," he would say to his wife in that same oratorical manner
previously noted, as he entered the house, "I've found such a poor
family. They have moved into the old saloon below Solmson's. You know
how open that is." This was delivered in the most dramatic style after
he had indicated something important by throwing his overcoat on the bed
and standing his cane in the corner. "There's a man and several children
there. The mother is dead. They were on their way to Kansas, but it got
so cold they've had to stop here until the winter is broken. They're
without food; almost no clothing. Can't we find something for them?"

"On these occasions," said his daughter to me once, "he would, as he
nearly always did, talk to himself on the way, as if he were discussing
politics. But you could never tell what he was coming for."

Then with his own labor he would help his wife seek out the odds and
ends that could be spared, and so armed, would return, arguing by the
way as if an errand of mercy were the last thing he contemplated. Nearly
always the subject of these orations was some public wrong or error
which should receive, although in all likelihood it did not, immediate
attention.

Always of a reverent, although not exactly religious, turn of mind, he
took considerable interest in religious ministration, though he steadily
and persistently refused, in his later years, to g