One day, I remember, we were sitting at the dinner-table, when a messenger came flying, “all wild with haste and fear,” to say that a fire had broken out at the Institution. Now, in those days there lay between Green Peace and the Institution a remnant of the famous Washington Heights, where Washington and his staff had once made their camp.
Much of the high ground had already been dug away, but there still remained a great hill sloping back and up from the garden wall, and terminating, on the side toward the Institution, in an abrupt precipice, some sixty feet high. The bearer of the bad news had been forced to come round by way of several streets, thus losing precious minutes; but the Doctor did not know what it was to lose a minute. Before any one could speak or ask what he would do he was out of the house, ran through the garden, climbed the slope at the back, rushed like a flame across the green hill-top, and slid down the almost perpendicular face of the precipice! Bruised and panting, he reached the Institution and saw at a glance that the fire was in the upper story. Take time to go round to the door and up the stairs? Not he! He “swarmed” up the gutter-spout, and in less time than it takes to tell it was on the roof, and cutting away at the burning timbers with an axe, which he had got hold of no one knows how. That fire was put out, as were several others at which our father assisted.
Fire is swift, but it could not get ahead of the Doctor.
These are a few of the stories; but, as I said, it needs a volume to tell all about our father’s life. I cannot tell in this short space how he worked with the friends of liberty to free the slave; how he raised the poor and needy, and “helped them to help themselves;” how he was a light to the blind, and to all who walked in darkness, whether of sorrow, sin, or suffering. Most men, absorbed in such high works as these would have found scant leisure for family life and communion; but no finger-ache of our father’s smallest child ever escaped his loving care, no childish thought or wish ever failed to win his sympathy. We who had this high privilege of being his children love to think of him as the brave soldier, the wise physician, the great philanthropist; but dearest of all is the thought of him as our loving and tender father.
And now, to end this chapter, you shall hear what Mr. Whittier, the noble and honored poet, thought of this friend of his:—
THE HERO.
“Oh for a knight like Bayard,
Without reproach or fear;
My light glove on his casque of steel,
My love-knot on his spear!
“Oh for the white plume floating
Sad Zutphen’s field above,—
The lion heart in battle,
The woman’s heart in love!
“Oh that man once more were manly,
Woman’s pride and not her scorn;
That once more the pale young mother
Dared to boast ‘a man is born’!
“But now life’s slumberous current
No sun-bowed cascade wakes;
No tall, heroic manhood
The level dullness breaks.