of popular rage against me is likely to be less violent in view of the fact that this one proved so plainly mt dead t do not wear my heart upon my sleeve and shrink x fix m the of matters purely personal upon an indifferent public i have aimed in the series closed to mainly such facts and incidents as seemed likely to be of use either in the young and for the battle of life or in to their acceptance convictions which i deem sound and important my life has one of rarely labor � of efforts to achieve other than personal ends � of efforts which have absorbed most of the time which others freely devote to social and to fireside of those i knew and loved iq youth a majority have already crossed the dark river and i will not impose even their names on an among them is my and life long friend who after long illness died in this city in my first partner already named who was drowned while bathing in and a young poet of promise who was slowly yielding to consumption when the tidings of our disaster snapped short his thread of life � as it would have snapped mine it been half so frail as his the faces of many among the departed whom i have known and loved come back to me as i gaze the vista of my half century of active life but i have no right to lift the veil which and their long repose i will name but those who are a part of myself and whose loss to earth has profoundly affected my subsequent career since i began to write these reminiscences my mother s recollections of a busy ufe last brother john has deceased aged seventy two leaving the old i understand to some among his children so has my father s brother aged eighty leaving so far as i know but one of the nine brothers john still living my father himself died on the th of december last aged eighty six he had for twelve years or more been a mere wreck first in body only but his ultimately his mind so that when i last visited him a year before his death he did not recognize me till after he had sat by my side for a full half hour and he had before asked my oldest sister did you ever � alluding to one of her sons then several years dead he had fitful flashes of mental recovery but he had been so long a helpless victim of hopeless bodily and mental decay that i did grieve when i learned that his spirit had at length shaken off the of its mortal which had ceased to be an instrument and remained purely an of his protracted life forty two years had been spent in or on the verge of new england and forty four in his deliberately chosen steadily retained home my son arthur young bom in march was the third of seven children whereof a son and daughter bom in and in scarcely opened their eyes to a world which they entered but to leave physically they were remarkable for their striking resemblance in hair and features to their father and mother arthur had points of to each of us but with decided superiority as a whole to either i looked in vain through italian galleries two years after he was taken from us for any full parallel to his dazzling beauty � a beauty not physical merely but visibly from the soul his hair was of the finest and richest gold the sunshine of picture never its equal and the delicacy of his complexion at once fixed the attention of like the late n p who had traversed both without having his gaze arrested by any child who could bear a dead � with this one yet he was not one of those sometimes met with whose chatter would a sunday school � who never do or say aught that propriety would not sanction and piety delight in � but thoroughly human and with a love of play and mischief which kept busy and happy the day while rendering him the delight and admiration of all around him the arch delicacy wherewith he suggested when once told a story that his i pose that a lie was characteristic of his nature once when about three years old having chanced to my watch lying on a sofa as i was dressing one sunday morning with no third person present he made a sudden spring of several feet caught the watch by the chain whirled it around his head and sent it against the chimney its face into fragments i inquired rather sadly than angrily how you do me such injury cause i was nervous he replied there were ladies then making part of our household whose nerves were a source of general as well as personal discomfort and this was his of the fact there were wiser and deeper sayings as they fell from his lips but i will not repeat them several yet live who remember the graceful wherewith he charmed admiring circles assembled at our house and at two or three larger of friends of social reform in this city and at the n a in new and i think some grave who were accustomed to help us enjoy our saturday in our rural residence at bay were drawn thither as much by their admiration of the son as by their regard for his parents meantime another daughter was given to us and after six months withdrawn and still another bom who yet and he had run far into his sixth year without one serious his mother had devoted herself to him from his birth even beyond her intense to the care of her other children had never allowed him to partake of animal recollections of 