hey said, "Let us go in were, and see what this is."
When they came out, is they both told me, they said to one another,
"This is the place for us" And they immediately connected themselves
with the congregation, to be among its most valued members.

Peter Cooper was even then meditating that plan of a grand Educational
Institute which he afterwards carried out. He was engaged in a large and
successful business, and his one idea which he often discussed with
me was to obtain the means of building that Institute. A man of the
gentlest nature and the simplest habits; yet his religious nature was
his most remarkable quality. It seemed to breathe through his life as
[90] fresh and tender as if it were in some holy retreat, instead of
a life of business. Mr. Cooper has become a distinguished man, much
engaged in public affairs, and much in society. I have seen him but
little of late years; but I trust he has not lost that which is worth
more than all the distinctions and riches in the world.

Joseph Curtis was a man much less known generally, and yet, in one
respect, much more, and that was in the sphere of the public schools. He
did more, I think, than any man to bring up the free schools of New York
to such a point as compelled our Boston visitors to confess that they
were not a whit inferior to their own. And his were voluntary and unpaid
services, though his means were always moderate. He neither had, nor
made, nor cared to make, a fortune. He cared for the schools as for
nothing else; and there is no wiser or nobler care. For more than twenty
years he spent half of his time in the schools, walking among them with
such intelligent and gentle oversight as to win universal confidence
and affection, so that he was commonly called, by teachers and pupils,
"Father Curtis."

At the same time, his hand and heart were open to every call of charity.
I remember once making him umpire between me and Horace Greeley, the
only time that I ever met the latter in company. He was saying, after
his fashion in the "Tribune,"--he was from nature and training a
Democrat, and had no natural right ever to be in [91] the Whig party, he
was saying that the miseries of the poor in New York were all owing to
the rich; when I said, "Mr. Greeley, here sits Mr. Joseph Curtis, who
has walked the streets of New York for more years than you and I have
been here, and I propose that we listen to him." He could not refuse to
make the appeal, and so I put