“I was called to go to Jacksonville to deliver an address,” he said, speaking of his brother’s death. “The journey was a long one, across two States (or one and a half). I took my wife and child with me, and we were gone some two weeks. When, on returning, we had got within two miles of Indianapolis, and were as elated and songful and merry as one can imagine anybody to be, we met one of the elders of my church riding out from the city, and he said, after stopping to greet us: ‘Have you heard the news?’ ‘No,’ said I; ‘what is it?’ ‘Your brother George has killed himself.’ I did not say a word, my wife did not say a word, and he did not say one word more. We rode on, and as we rode I could not help thinking, ‘Killed himself! killed himself! killed himself!’ It was nearly an hour before we got home, and then I learned that my brother’s death was caused by an accident with a double-barrelled gun while he was shooting birds in the garden; and it was a great relief to me to know that ‘killed himself’ did not mean suicide.” Later came the death of his little boy George, the first loss in his own immediate family. He wrote, a few years later, to his sister, Mrs. Stowe: “I was in a missionary field, enduring hardships, and thinking in myself always how to stand up under any blow, even if it were a thunder-stroke, with Paul’s heroism at once firing me and putting me to shame. Our noble boy suddenly sickened. Our people did not know _how_ to sympathize. Few came while he lived; fewer yet when, on a bleak March day, we bore him through the storm, and, standing in the snow, we laid his beautiful form in his cold, white grave. Eunice was heart-broken. My home was a fountain of anguish. It was not for me to quail or show shrinking. So I choked my grief and turned outwardly from myself to seek occupation.” In later years this sorrow had hardly lost its acuteness: “I remember, to-night, as well as I did at the time, the night that my eldest-born son died. That was my first great sorrow. I remember the battle of hope and of fear, and I remember the victory of submission. The child revived in the night. I went to Indianapolis (I lived on the edge of that city), and I shall never forget the amazing uplift of soul that I had, nor that one unspoken, universal thought of prayer, which seemed to me to fill the whole hemisphere, for the life of my child. I think that if one ever came near throwing his soul out of his body, I did. And yet before the morning dawned the child had found a brighter world. This was a double sorrow because I had given him up and then taken him back again. Then came the sudden wrench. “It was in March, and there had just come up a great storm, and all the ground was covered with snow.