Mr. Wilkins has a wife, two children, and a charming home. Of his family he says: “None of my relatives have ever been hung, but once a brother-in-law came near going to Congress. My war record is good—as during the rebellion I did not have a hand in the public treasury, but a second cousin of my wife sent a substitute, who by jumping bounties like a true patriot, covered the family with glory enough to reach me.”
As a politician, Mr. Wilkins succeeded through the aid of his paper and his friends, in holding one office, three times being collector of canal tolls at the port of Whitehall, during the years 1874, 1875, and 1878. He is a very small man, being something like five feet four inches in height. He possesses a pleasant cheery face, and adorns the lower portion of it with a moustache of a heavy and a beard of a light growth. His literary work has of late years been devoted almost exclusively to the Times. Recently he has essayed domestic sketches, stories of the home circle, and romantic tales of travel and adventure.
A New York humorist says admiringly of Wilkins: “He is a trump card in the fraternity he adorns. Never a stone has he laid in the path of an earnest fellow laborer. Meet him when you will and where you will, there is the same cordial impressment, the same hand-grip that goes straight to your marrow of susceptibility. It has been my lot to meet him when conviviality held full sway, and again when family affliction had tightly drawn the chords of sympathy; but the same gentle spirit was the thrall. The world is better for such lives; better for the kindly sentiments that emanate from minds charged less with self-opinion than liberal thoughts of and for mankind; better for the outflow of their broad religion, and safer because it is a religion of impulse, a creed born of sentiment and fostered by philanthrophy.”
Wilkins’ admirable essay on Father Adam is undoubtedly the best thing he has written. It was originally published in the Whitehall Times in 1879, and is as follows:
ADAM’S FALL.
Adam was the first man—if he had been a shoe-maker he would have been the last man.
He was placed in the Garden of Eden and was himself the guardian of Eden. He consequently had no partner to order him up mornings, and he, therefore, played it alone.
All the clothes he had for a long time was the close of day, while a mantle of night was his bed-clothes.
He had dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and he also had hoe-minion over the earth.
He was finally furnished with a woman of A-rib-ia, who was sent to Eden for Adam’s Express Company. She was bone of his beauin’, and if she had been called Nancy, she would have been his bone-nancy.