hough they had never been opened. Indeed, his reticence
was at times something remarkable. I took him to see President Grant at
Long Branch, and though they had both been great warriors, the one
fighting the battles of the Lord and the other the battles of his
country, they had little to say, and there was, I thought, at the time,
more silence crowded together than I ever noticed in the same amount of
space before.

But the story of my brother's work has already been told in the Heavens
by those who, through his instrumentality, have already reached the City
of Raptures. However, his chief work is yet to come. We get our
chronology so twisted that we come to believe that the white marble of
the tomb is the milestone at which the good man stops, when it is only a
milestone on a journey, the most of the miles of which are yet to be
travelled. The Chinese Dictionary which my brother prepared during more
than two decades of study; the religious literature he transferred from
English into Chinese; the hymns he wrote for others to sing, although he
himself could not sing at all (he and I monopolising the musical
incapacity of a family in which all the rest could sing well); the
missionary stations he planted; the life he lived, will widen out and
deepen and intensify through all time and all eternity.

Never in the character of a Chinaman was there the trait of commercial
fraud that assailed our American cities in 1879. It got into our food
finally--the very bread we ate was proven to be an adulteration of
impure stuff. What an extravagance of imagination had crept into our
daily life! We pretended even to eat what we knew we were not eating.
Except for the reminder which old books written in byegone simpler days
gave us, we should have insisted that the world should believe us if we
said black was white. Still, among us there were some who were genuine,
but they seemed to be passing away. It was in this year that the oldest
author in America died, Richard Henry Dana. He was born in 1788, when
literature in this country was just beginning. His death stirred the
tenderest emotions. Authorship was a new thing in America when Mr. Dana
began to write, and it required endurance and persistence. The
atmosphere was chilling to literature then, there was little applause
for poetic or literary skill. There were no encouragements when
Washington Irving wrote as "Knickerbocker," when Richard Henry Dana
wrote "The Buccaneer," "The Idle