We should not omit to mention in this place the remarkable degree of affection that ever actuated the subject of this biography towards each and all of the members of his father's extensive family; and this feeling was reciprocal too; especially have we personally observed this on the part of the brothers, whom he frequently visited, through the entire period of their lives. Much older than himself, as far back as our memory of them extends they were venerable and grey-haired men, and treated Hosea more like a son than a brother. Their meetings together, from time to time, were reunions of great satisfaction and happiness. Fully admitting his superior scriptural knowledge and judgment, they delighted to converse upon the theme of religion, and mutually to express the strength of their faith and the joy they found in believing. It was this younger brother who converted them to the belief of God's impartial and free grace, and they died at last with their minds freed from every doubt as it regarded the subject. One or two of these brothers had believed what was called Universalism quite as early as had Hosea, but they had believed it as it was then taught on the old Calvinistic principle, which made it in reality anything but Universalism. It was from this ill-defined platform, this faith of inconsistencies, that Hosea brought their minds to embrace that creed which is now acknowledged as the doctrine of the Universalist denomination. When he spoke to them and of them, it was with that tender and affectionate regard with which his heart was ever filled to overflowing. I have taken some pains to state the foregoing facts of genealogy thus carefully, merely for the sake of completeness, and not for the purpose of establishing the fact that the family is "an old one." The idea that to be able to trace back one's pedigree any great length of time, imparts any degree of merit or distinction in itself, is a palpable absurdity, inasmuch as the further back we refer ourselves in our origin, the more nearly do we approximate to the same ancestry with the veriest serf in the world. Sir Thomas Overbury said of a man who boasted of his ancestry, that he was like a potato plant,--the best thing belonging to him was under ground! Mr. Ballou was no pensioner upon the dead. The laurels that surrounded the brow of his riper years were self-earned, and worthy of emulation. CHAPTER III. EARLY LIFE.