THE LIBRARY.
“Doctor Hale, you yourself have hinted at it, namely, that the worst thing your friends say about you is, that you have too many irons in the fire. Do you think that thereby you have missed an opportunity in life?”
“I am glad you asked that question,” he reassured me with his most winning smile. “I don’t think I have,” he said slowly. “I might have written better verses; by the way”—I thought he was changing the subject—“I am just editing a collection of my verses for Roberts Brothers, to be called ‘For Fifty Years.’ On the title-page this quotation from the ‘Ingham 299 Papers’ will be printed as a motto for the poems. Read it aloud to me.”
Judge how I was moved as I read the following words to him:
“Poor Ingham was painfully conscious that he had no peculiar genius for one duty rather than another. If it were his duty to write verses, he wrote verses; to lay telegraph, he laid telegraph; to fight slavers, he fought slavers; to preach sermons, he preached sermons. And he did one of these things with just as much alacrity as the other; the moral purpose entirely controlling such mental aptness or physical habits as he could bring to bear.”
As my voice died away among the volumes, it flashed across me that in these words could be found Doctor Hale’s mental and spiritual biography.
“Is this your epitaph?” I asked, very soberly.
“I am willing to stand by this as my epitaph,” he repeated after me, in his gravest tones.