with long reverberations. No one that I ever knew understood more fully
the science of a good laugh. He was not only quick to recognize hilarity
when created by others, but was always ready to do his share toward making
it. Before extreme old age, he could outrun and outleap any of his
children. He did not hide his satisfaction at having outwalked some one
who boasted of his pedestrianism, or at having been able to swing the
scythe after all the rest of the harvesters had dropped from exhaustion, or
at having, in legislative hall, tripped up some villainous scheme for
robbing the public treasury. We never had our ears boxed, as some children
I wot of, for the sin of being happy. In long winter nights it was hard to
tell who enjoyed sportfulness the better, the children who romped the
floor, or the parents who, with lighted countenance, looked at them. Great
indulgence and leniency characterized his family rule, but the remembrance
of at least one correction more emphatic than pleasing proves that he was
not like Eli of old, who had wayward sons and restrained them not. In the
multitude of his witticisms there were no flings at religion, no
caricatures of good men, no trifling with things of eternity. His laughter
was not the 'crackling of thorns under a pot,' but the merry heart that
doeth good like a medicine. For this all the children of the community
knew him; and to the last day of his walking out, when they saw him coming
down the lane, shouted, 'Here comes grandfather!' No gall, no acerbity, no
hypercriticism. If there was a bright side to anything, he always saw it,
and his name, in all the places where he dwelt, will long be a synonym for
exhilaration of spirit.

"But whence this cheerfulness? Some might ascribe it ail to natural
disposition. No doubt there is such a thing as sunshine of temperament.
God gives more brightness to the almond tree than to the cypress. While
the pool putrefies under the summer sun, God slips the rill off of the
rocks with a frolicsomeness that fills the mountain with echo. No doubt