Forty Years in South China | Page 5

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 constitutional structure had much to do with this cheerfulness.
He had, by a life of sobriety, preserved his freshness and vigor. You
know that good habits are better than speaking tubes to the ear; better
than a staff to the hand; better than lozenges to the throat; better than
warm baths to the feet; better than bitters for the stomach. His lips had
not been polluted, nor his brain befogged, by the fumes of the noxious
weed that has sapped the life of whole generations, sending even
ministers of the Gospel to untimely graves, over which the tombstone
declared, 'Sacrificed by overwork in the Lord's vineyard,' when if the
marble had not lied, it would have said, 'Killed by villainous tobacco!'
He abhorred anything that could intoxicate, being among the first in
this country to join the crusade against alcoholic beverages. When
urged, during a severe sickness, to take some stimulus, he said, 'No! If I
am to die, let me die sober!' The swill of the brewery had never been
poured around the roots of this thrifty almond. To the last week of his
life his ear could catch a child's whisper, and at fourscore years his eyes
refused spectacles, although he would sometimes have to hold the book
off on the other side of the light, as octogenarians are wont to do. No
trembling of the hands, no rheum in the eyes, no knocking together of
the knees, no hobbling on crutches with what polite society terms
rheumatism in the feet, but what everybody knows is nothing but gout.
Death came, not to fell the gnarled trunk of a tree worm-eaten and
lightning-blasted, but to hew down a Lebanon cedar, whose fall made
the mountains tremble and the heavens ring. But physical health could
not account for half of this sunshine. Sixty-four years ago a coal from
the heavenly altar had kindled a light that shone brighter and brighter to
the perfect day. Let Almighty grace for nearly three-quarters of a
century triumph in a man's soul, and do you wonder that he is happy?
For twice the length of your life and mine he had sat in the bower of the
promises, plucking the round, ripe clusters of Eshcol. While others bit
their tongues for thirst, he stood at the wells of salvation, and put his
lips to the bucket that came up dripping with the fresh, cool, sparkling
waters of eternal life. This joy was not that which breaks in the bursting
bubble of the champagne glass, or that which is thrown out with the

orange-peelings of a midnight bacchanalia, but the joy which, planted
by a Saviour's pardoning grace, mounts up higher and higher, till it
breaks forth in the acclaim of the hundred and forty and four thousand
who have broken their last chain and wept their last sorrow. Oh!
mighty God! How deep, how wide, how high the joy Thou kindles" in
the heart of the believer!
"Again: We behold in our father the beauty of a Christian faith.
"Let not the account of this cheerfulness give you the idea that he never
had any trouble. But few men have so serious