ORANGE CONG. CHURCH 35
winding over the distant hills, of some neighbor fallen in life's battle, to whom only the debt and duty then was owing to "Give him a little earth for charity !"
"0 Time and Change ! with hair as grey
As was my sire's that winter's day.
How strange it seems with so much gone
Of life and love, to still live on !"
We are glad indeed that time and change have made our lot less toilsome, less stormy, than was that of our fathers, that we live in an easier age and under softer skies. But we rejoice on this memorial day not the less that our time is better and that we can live more amply than they, only because they had courage to act and fortitude to bear, honesty with themselves and uprightness with their fellows, integrity of purpose, an unbending code of personal and political morals, and a civic and religious conscience that did not dare to palter with so grave a thing as life. It is our strength of to-day that these surrounding hills are not more firmly fixed in their abiding place than were our ancestors whose work we now commemorate in the principles which they both professed and lived.
"The seeds of good they sow are sacred seeds.
And bear their righteous fruits for general weal
When sleeps the husbandman."
My Friends, I am commended to you as being "reminiscent"; the word is in some sense a misnomer here. I cannot be reminiscent otherwise than to spell out of the many, many recollections which throng upon me to-day, within earshot of the old roof-tree, the lesson at once of gratitude for the past, of joy in the present, and of hope for the future. To the philosophic eye is given to see in this old Church of famous memory the monument to the Connecticut type of man; he was the "integer vitae" in a sense infinitely higher and broader and deeper than it ever entered into the heart of Horace to conceive. And now, at the end of the time allotted to me here, if I may become hor-