With his little ones, on Sundays, he walked in the woods hard by his house; and on clear nights he often pointed out to them the stars and constellations, and told them of the myths that cluster about Orion, the Pleiads and other denizens of the nightly firmament. He had his own telescope and frequently searched the heavens with it for hours. "It is well," he says, "to look upon the Christmas skies when the most glorious constellations of the year are gathered as at the world's great festival. It will give us higher conceptions of life and tone down excesses we too often indulge in through the anniversary week that closes up the year." But let us look more closely at the man himself and then give his work such examination as time left us will admit. Tall, slender, erect in carriage, clean shaven, with dark brown hair and eyes, rapid in his movements, the scholar and the gentleman written unmistakably on every lineament, and William Ward, the man, is as nearly portrayed as can now be done; for except a little daguerreotype taken for his wife, which has been lost, he sat for no other picture. Singularly reserved and almost shy in public, with his children and with his intimate friends he was delightfully communicative, a vein of quiet humor often outcropping in his words and deeds. Public life he generally avoided; offices which he might have held, he would not accept, although urged upon him. A loyal, ardent Odd Fellow, like Abou Ben Adhem, he "loved his fellow-man," and was loved by them in turn. His addresses and poems on the anniversaries of this order, and at decorations of the soldiers' graves were much admired. Though educated for an Episcopal clergyman, he never united with the church, at least in the South, more than as a vestryman for a time. It is to be regretted that, with outward eye so quick to see and interpret the true and beautiful, his eyes of faith could not discern more clearly the full truth and beauty of God's written Revelation. If so, his pathetic lines on "Hope," composed a few years after his wife's death, would have had a more triumphant ring than is contained in the last two stanzas. Elsewhere hopes shines brighter and faith soars on stronger wings, as when in his "In Memoriam" poem to his wife, he sings: "Still for this grief so desolate, so lone, A solace for unmated hearts is given, Another hand, another voice hath known The symphonies of heaven." In the sixty-fourth year of his age, at the season he loved best, the Christmas-tide, December 27, 1887, the gentle spirit of William Ward softly slipped from its earthly moorings. His body by loving hands was tenderly laid to rest in the cemetery at Macon, his home for nearly two score years.