at address, "my dearest Mr. Sedgwick," from a
wife a dozen years after marriage, shows a becoming degree of respect.

We may be sure that this gentle mother would have encouraged no silly
notions of social distinctions in the minds of her children. Even Mr.
Sedgwick seems to have had a softer and more human side to his nature
than we have yet seen. Miss Sedgwick enjoys repeating a story which
she heard from a then "venerable missionary." The son of the village
shoemaker, his first upward step was as boy-of-all-work of the clerk
of courts. He had driven his master to the court session in dignified
silence, broken on arrival by a curt order to take in the trunk. "As
he set it down in the entry," says Miss Sedgwick, "my father, then
judge of the Supreme Judicial Court, was coming down stairs, bringing
his trunk himself. He set it down, accosted the boy most kindly, and
gave him his cordial hand. The lad's feelings, chilled by his master's
haughtiness, at once melted, and took an impression of my father's
kindness that was never effaced."

The individual is so much a creature of his environment, that I must
carry these details a little farther. Forty years in public life,
Judge Sedgwick had an extended acquaintance and, according to the
custom of the time, kept open house. "When I remember," says Miss
Sedgwick, "how often the great gate swung open for the entrance of
traveling vehicles, the old mansion seems to me much more like an
hostelrie of the olden time than the quiet house it now is. My
father's hospitality was unbounded. It extended from the gentleman in
his coach, chaise, or on horseback, according to his means or
necessities, to the poor, lame beggar that would sit half the night
roasting at the kitchen fire with the negro servants. My father was in
some sort the chieftain of his family, and his home was their resort
and resting-place. Uncles and aunts always found a welcome there;
cousins wintered and summered with us. Thus hospitality was an element
in our education. It elicited our faculties of doing and suffering. It
smothered the love and habit of minor comforts and petty physical
indulgences that belong to a higher state of civilization and generate
selfishness, and it made regard for others, and small sacrifices for
them, a habit."

Just one word more about this home, the like of which it would be hard
to find in our generation: "No bickering or dissention was ever
permitted. Love was the habit, the life