whose mother was Mr. Smith's only sister. The journey from New York to
Peterboro was cold and dreary, and climbing the hills from Canastota in
an open sleigh, nine hundred feet above the valley, with the thermometer
below zero, before sunrise, made all nature look as sombre as the sad
errand on which we came.

Outside the mansion everything in its wintry garb was cold and still,
and all within was silent as the grave. The central figure, the light
and joy of that home, had vanished forever. He who had welcomed us on
that threshold for half a century would welcome us no more. We did what
we could to dissipate the gloom that settled on us all. We did not
intensify our grief by darkening the house and covering ourselves with
black crape, but wore our accustomed dresses of chastened colors and
opened all the blinds that the glad sunshine might stream in. We hung
the apartment where the casket stood with wreaths of evergreens, and
overhead we wove his favorite mottoes in living letters, "Equal rights
for all!" "Rescue Cuba now!" The religious services were short and
simple; the Unitarian clergyman from Syracuse made a few remarks, the
children from the orphan asylum, in which he was deeply interested, sang
an appropriate hymn, and around the grave stood representatives of the
Biddles, the Dixwells, the Sedgwicks, the Barclays, and Stantons, and
three generations of his immediate family. With a few appropriate words
from General John Cochrane we left our beloved kinsman alone in his
last resting place. Two months later, on his birthday, his wife, Ann
Carroll Fitzhugh, passed away and was laid by his side. Theirs was a
remarkably happy union of over half a century, and they were soon
reunited in the life eternal.