There was another uncle, Uncle Lem, sailmaker by trade, whose soul was as white as the canvas on which he worked. He was the son of Lemuel and Abigail (Pierce) Simmons, and was born in 1790. He married in 1818 Priscilla, daughter of Thomas Sherman, and died December 6, 1863. No truer inscription was ever cut on a gravestone than that which says in simple, unaffected words that, “he was universally beloved and respected; honest and upright, with a cheerful, pleasant manner, and a kind, benevolent heart. To know him was to love him.” There was still another uncle of whom I am glad of an opportunity to say a word as the tribute of a friend to his memory. Uncle Ed. Watson, the Lord of the Isle, was in many respects a remarkable man. Born and bred on Clark’s Island at the entrance of Plymouth harbor about four miles from town, and eighty acres in extent, he there spent his life a sailor and fisherman when occasion demanded, always a farmer familiar with the secrets which nature is ready to disclose to her lovers, a poet of no mean acquirements, and above all a student of the events of the world, a philosopher who acted his philosophy without preaching it, and who as much deserves the title of sage as some who in a broader field won a more notorious name. He did not talk philosophy as Hawthorne described Emerson and Thoreau talking it, leaning on their hoes in the garden with Alcott sitting on the fence discoursing on the “Why and the Wherefore,” but as he laboriously tilled the soil he recognized in every stone and worm and blade of grass the prodigality of nature, and in every annual bloom of the buttercup and rose a lesson of obedience to the laws of God. He said to me once, “Oh, Mr. Davis, if all were as obedient to the divine will as the blossoms on yonder apple tree, by Geo. Germain, what a world this would be.” In his island home he was hospitable to the last degree. Visitors came to his grounds as if they were public, and if friends were among them he dropped his hoe or spade or scythe to entertain them when his labor in the field could ill be spared, and perhaps invited them to partake of his noonday meal, but like Sir Roderick: “Yet not in action, word or eye, Failed aught in hospitality.”