too strong for those of you who never had an opportunity of gathering the
fruit of this luxuriant almond tree.

"First. In my father's old age was to be seen the beauty of a cheerful
spirit. I never remember to have heard him make a gloomy expression. This
was not because he had no conception of the pollutions of society. He
abhorred everything like impurity, or fraud, or double-dealing. He never
failed to lift up his voice against sin, when he saw it. He was terrible in
his indignation against wrong, and had an iron grip for the throat of him
who trampled on the helpless. Better meet a lion robbed of her whelps than
him, if you had been stealing the bread from the mouth of the fatherless.
It required all the placidity of my mother's voice to calm him when once
the mountain storm of his righteous wrath was in full blast; while as for
himself, he would submit to more imposition, and say nothing, than any man
I ever knew.

"But while sensitive to the evils of society, he felt confident that all
would be righted. When he prayed, you could hear in the very tones of his
voice the expectation that Christ Jesus would utterly demolish all
iniquity, and fill the earth with His glory. This Christian man was not a
misanthrope, did not think that everything was going to ruin, considered
the world a very good place to live in. He never sat moping or despondent,
but took things as they were, knowing that God could and would make them
better. When the heaviest surge of calamity came upon him, he met it with
as cheerful a countenance as ever a bather at the beach met the incoming
Atlantic, rising up on the other side of the wave stronger than when it
smote him. Without ever being charged with frivolity, he sang, and
whistled, and laughed. He knew about all the cheerful tunes that were ever
printed in old 'New Brunswick Collection,' and the 'Strum Way,' and the
sweetest melodies that Thomas Hastings ever composed. I think that every