Forty Years in South China | Page 5

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 and overwhelming a life struggle. He went out into the world without means, and with no educational opportunity, save that which was afforded him in the winter months, in an old, dilapidated school-house, from instructors whose chief work was to collect their own salary. Instead of postponing the marriage relation, as modern society compels a