Those frequent and long journeys went far to break up the happy home life in which he delighted, with the wife whose congenial and intimate companionship was his for nine years and the little girls to whom he was the most delightful of fathers. Then for twelve years, until his second marriage, he was almost a homeless man. He wore out his wonderful constitution; he suffered from dyspepsia and sleeplessness; a paralytic stroke crippled him; but for a year and a half he struggled on, cheerful, self-forgetful,--then the end. His countrymen scarcely yet realize all that he was. He was the successful leader in that real emancipation of the American negro to which the legal emancipation was but a prelude. Beyond that, it would hardly be too much to say that he did more than any other man in either hemisphere to rationalize and Christianize our still half-medieval system of education. The working ideals of Hampton are to-day higher than those of Yale and Harvard. It may be questioned whether any professed preacher has done so much to develop the best modern type of religion; centered in daily work, reaching out into all human service, and consciously inspired by the divine life. It would not be extravagant to say that in the little group--perhaps half a dozen in all--whom America has contributed to the world's first rank of great men, not one stands higher in heroic manhood and far-reaching service than Samuel Armstrong. But any comparison seems almost unworthy of his lofty spirit. There is no rivalry among the saints. Would that Armstrong could here be portrayed as he appeared in life. The outer man spoke well the inner. To look upon, he was a thoroughbred; of soldierly bearing, alert, vivid, noble; with the twinkle of mirth, the flash of resistless purpose,--a man to love, to revere, to follow. As a sort of mental portrait-sketch, we may glean a few of his sayings. It was as true of him as of Luther that his words were half-battles. They were flashed out like sparks struck from action. As to his special work, these: "The North thinks that the great thing is to free the negro from his former owner; the real thing is to save him from himself." On the dissolution of the American Anti-slavery Society, (because nothing remained for it to do): "It failed to see that everything remained. Their work was just beginning when slavery was abolished." "I cannot understand the prevailing views of the war among pious and intelligent Americans. It is simply barbaric--to whip the South and go home rejoicing, to build monuments of victory, leaving one-third of their countrymen in the depths of distress." "The reconstruction measures were a bridge of wood over a river of fire."