“But I fear,” he said at last, “that the interest of my subject has made me transgress upon your patience; and with a word or two more I will close.
“When we remember what hard, trying things often arise within a single day, let us rightly estimate the patient well-doing of a man who has lived a blameless life for a hundred years. When we remember what harm, what sin, can be crowded into a single moment, let us rightly estimate the principle that kept him so close to the golden rule not for a day, not for a decade or a generation, but for a hundred years.
“And now, as we are about to lay his deserted body in the earth, let not our perceptions be dulled by the constant repetition in this world of death and burial. At this hour our friend is no longer aged; wrinkles and furrows, trembling limbs and snowy locks, he has left behind him, and he knows, we believe, to-day more than the wisest philosopher on earth. We may study and argue all our lives to discover the nature of life or the form it takes beyond the grave; but in one moment of swift transition the righteous man may learn it all. We differ widely one from another here in mental power. A slight hardening of some tissue of the brain might have left a Shakspere an attorney’s clerk. But in the brighter world no such impediments prevent, I believe, clear vision and clear expression; and differences of mind that seem world-wide here may vanish there. When the spirit breaks its earthly prison and flies away, who can tell how bright and free the humblest of us may come to be? There may be a more varied truth than we commonly think in the words, ‘The last shall be first.’
“Let this day be remembered. Let us think of the vast display of nature’s forces which was made within the long period of our old neighbor’s life; but let us also reflect upon the bright pageant that is now unrolling itself before him in a better world.”
THAT evening Miss Maria and her brothers, sitting in state in the little old house, received many a caller, and the conversation was chiefly upon one theme: not the funeral sermon, although that was commended as a frank and simple biographical discourse, but the great events which had accompanied Uncle Capen’s progress through this world, almost like those which Horace records in his ode to Augustus.
“That’s trew, every word,” said Apollos Carver. “When Uncle Capen was a boy there wasn’t one railroad in the hull breadth of the United States, and, just think, why, now you can go in a Pullerman car clear acrost to San Francisco. My daughter lives in Oakland, just across a ferry from there.”
“Well, then, there’s photographing,” said Captain Abel. “It doos seem amazing, as the minister said: you set down, and square yourself, and slick your hair, and stare stiddy into a funnel, and a man ducks his head under a covering, and, pop! there you be as natural as life, if not more so. And when Uncle Capen was a young man there wasn’t nothing but portraits and mini’tures, and these black-paper-and-scissors portraits—what do they call ’em? Yes, sir, all that come in under his observation.”
“Yes,” said one of the sons, “it’s wonderful. My wife and me was took setting on a settee in the Garden of Eden, lions and tigers and other scriptural objects in the background.”
“And don’t forget the telegraph,” said Maria; “don’t forget that.”
“Trew,” said Apollos, “that’s another thing. I hed a message come oncet from my son that lives to Taunton. We was all so sca’t and faint when we see it that we didn’t none of us dast to open it, and finally the feller that druv over with it hed to open it fer us.”