I have often heard him quote as his motto, both for organization and for literary effort, the expressive sentence: "_Get in your work._" "Let fools take the credit if they want it," was the implication of his tone, and I shall never forget the delightful smile with which he repeated Charles Mackay's lines, most singularly transposing the author's meaning: "Grub little moles----." He took an especial pleasure in grubbing, and smiling when a streak of sunlight fell on some one else. I have said that this distinguishing characteristic, so fruitful in results in his later life, was partly instinctive and partly a philosophic conviction. The instinctive side may be best understood by a brief sketch of his ancestry. It is generally complained that the troublesome people who are never satisfied to let society alone, must necessarily be foreigners; at least they can never belong to the same nation as we, the good, the respectable. The easy method of laying everything pestilent to the charge of the foreigner, will not serve a conservative American against Dyer D. Lum. The first of the Lums to set foot in this country was Samuel L., a Scotchman, in the year 1732. They rooted in New England soil, and at the time of the Revolution, Dyer's great grandfather was a minute-man in the very town, Northampton, where his own corpse was laid a year ago. On the maternal side the Tappan family were also revolutionists, and back of revolutionists Reformationists in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and still back of that, Crusaders. All this would be important enough and indeed even distinguishing, were I relating it by way of "gilding refined gold"; but they acquire meaning the moment we regard them as data for a character. They are fraught with mysterious symbolism, and he himself becomes a symbol of the deep-rooted faith of humanity, when we see that subterranean stream of blood running from Jerusalem through Europe and across the sea to America. It shows how profound is the well-spring of devotion to cause in the human heart; through how many centuries the spirit of rebellion lives. But what, say you, had it to do with his instinctive modesty? This: _the devotee of a cause is never the devotee of self_.