In celebrating this golden wedding anniversary, all the halcyon days of our lives are included and there come to us messages from the past, under the sea and over the land, burdened with the aroma of violets and roses, caught from the flower gardens of memory, planted in youth and blooming in perennial beauty to old age.

I confess to you, my venerable parents, and to you my sisters and brothers, and to those of younger generations, to overmastering emotions of love and gratitude as I survey this family scene, never to be pictured again save upon the canvas of our memories. But I would voice no requiem note. Today our ears are not attuned to the dirge’s mournful cadence. This is not the occasion for planting weeping-willows, the cypress or the ivy vine—

“Creeping where grim death is seen.”

Here the mingled cup of love and gratitude and joy, brimful, is quaffed in honor of an event which to us all is a priceless benediction; but, if from its foundation a tear mingles with the draught to sparkle on the brim of the loving cup, it bears testimony that our hearts are touched by feelings as divine as ever sanctified human affection.

The serenity, the rare loveliness of this scene create emotions which no words, however fitly chosen, can express. I can but say in the name of my sisters and my brothers and those younger in the bonds of family allegiance to our father—the patriarch of these sons and daughters—that we tender him our warmest congratulations upon this rare occasion. When we greet him our hearts are in our hands; when we kiss his time-furrowed cheeks our hearts are on our lips, and when we congratulate him upon this, his golden wedding anniversary, our hearts are in our words.

Freely do we avow the fealty of our love for his devotion to us, his children, for his watchful guardianship over our giddy footsteps on youth’s flowery pathways; and this love is blended with profound veneration for his courage, which no vicissitude could dampen; for his masculine virtues which have endeared him to the home circle; for his spotless integrity of character which has given him the confidence of men, whether in poverty’s vale or upon the more elevated plane of prosperity, secured by industry and frugality, and above all, for that parental ambition and self-denial to secure for us an education which should equip his children for respectable and honorable positions in life.

This, my beloved and honored sire, is the tribute of affection your children bring to you today. Your tender and unceasing devotion has won the overflowing gratitude of our hearts, and this thankfulness, this abounding sense of obligation, dearest father, we children with the fingers of our love weave today into a crown and place it on your venerable head, and though the years shall continue to whiten your locks, dim the lustre of your eyes and impair the strength of your manly form, the wealth of our affection shall ever increase, nor shall it cease when the silver cord be loosed and at the final goal you lay all your burdens down.

And now our happy family circle, rejoicing in kindred ties, will fill again the sparkling cup with the ambrosia of affection that we may drink to:

“My mother’s voice! how often creep

Its accents on my lonely hours.