Before that, he had removed to New York City, and engaged in business there as a railway stock-broker. He was, up to a few months prior to his death, President of the Wabash Railway, and maintained throughout his blameless and beneficent life, a reputation for probity, energy, and talent.
Peace to his knightly soul!
He was passing good to me that summer. In company with his wife, we drove, sailed, and visited steamships, Bunker Hill Monument, and other places of historic interest. In their society I made my first visit to the theatre, and attended concerts and lectures. He lent me books, and led me on to discuss them, then, and when I was at home. And this when he was building up his business, looking after various family interests, not strictly his own (he was forever lending a hand to somebody!), and studying late into the night, as if working for a university degree. I am told that such men are so rare in our time and country as to make this one of my heroes a phenomenon.
It is not marvellous that friendships like these, enjoyed when character and opinion were in forming, should have cultivated optimism that has withstood the shock and undermining of late disappointments. It may well be that I have not known another man who, with his fortune to found, a household to support, and a press of mental toil that would have exhausted the energies of the average student, would have kept up a correspondence with a child for the sake of pleasing and educating her, and carried it on out of affectionate interest in a provincial kinswoman.
Affection and genial sympathy, with whatever concerned me or mine, endured to the end. He was my husband’s warm friend, a second father to my children—always and everywhere, my ally.
My last sight of him, before he succumbed to lingering and mortal illness, is vividly present with me. We had dined with him and his wife, and said to ourselves as we had hundreds of times, that time had mellowed, without dimming her beauty, and made him magnificent. The word is none too strong to describe him, as he towered above me in the parting words exchanged in light-heartedness unchecked by any premonition that we might never chat and laugh together again this side of the Silent Sea. He was over six feet in height; his hair and flowing beard were silver-white; his fine eyes darker and brighter by contrast; his smile was as gentle and his repartee as ready as when he had jested with me in those bygone summers from which the glory has never faded for me.
My upturned face must have expressed something of what filled heart and thoughts, for he drew me up to him suddenly, and kissed me between the eyes. Then, with the laugh I knew so well, he held out his hand to my husband:
“You mustn’t be jealous, my dear fellow! I knew her a long time before you ever saw her. And such good friends as we have been for—bless my soul!—can it be more than fifty years?”
Again I say: “God rest his knightly soul!” It is worth living to have known one such man, and to have had him for my “good friend” for “more than fifty years.”