on
for speaking out the necessary truth as he saw it. Some of his best
friends felt that he had blundered, but no one who saw and heard this
frail and pale-faced Baptist minister, as he stood by the coffin of
Samuel Shaw uttering the quiet words that fell like lead upon the tense
and breathless audience, may honestly deny his courage.

In some respects the most remarkable man in Cooperstown at this period
was Dr. Henry D. Sill. It is perhaps a singular distinction in a
Christian community that Dr. Sill should have been chiefly renowned for
being a Christian. It was not that the Christianity of the village was
below the average of Christian communities. It was rather that Dr. Sill
so strikingly personified the Christian virtues as to become a saint
among Christians. By common consent he was put in a class by himself.
Christians were exhorted to imitate him, but nobody was expected really
to equal him. He was at this time only forty years old, but was revered
not only by the young, but by the aged, as wise unto salvation. He was
the son of Jedediah P. Sill, a respected and influential business man of
Cooperstown, and after graduation at Princeton and at the College of
Physicians and Surgeons, he settled down to practise in his own village.
Dr. Sill lived with his sister at "The Maples," in the spacious house
which stands on Chestnut Street, with sculptured lions guarding the
doorway, next to the Methodist parsonage. His office occupied the little
wing at the north. Unlike some who pass for philanthropists in the
outer world, Henry Sill was regarded as a saint in his own household.
Mrs. Robe, the aged aunt who made one of the family, and cultivated the
art of growing old beautifully and gracefully, herself a Unitarian, used
always to conclude her frequent arguments against Calvinistic theology
by saying, "Well, Henry wouldn't treat people so, and I believe that God
is as good as Henry!"

Dr. Sill was a man of some means, but spent very little on himself. It
had been his ambition to be a missionary, but since circumstances made
it impossible to carry out this design, he annually contributed the
entire salary of a foreign missionary whom he called his "substitute."
He spent large sums of money in the improvement of Thanksgiving
Hospital, in which he was deeply interested, and the equipment of that
institution, especially of the operating-room, which gave it a rank far
above the hospitals in many larger towns, was chiefly ow