EDITORIAL AND GENERAL 



473 



To his relatives he was known as 

 "Uncle Bue," and to his many friends 

 as "Pa," and among his friends were 

 men in all walks of life. 



He started out in his business life, 

 spurred by necessity and the usual 

 youthful zeal. From the position of 

 clerk in a grocery he went to New 

 York. A few years later found him in 

 Dixie in partnership with a photo- 

 grapher. One morning he arrived at 

 the office to find that the partner and 

 business had vanished. This was the 

 time of the great gold fever in Cali- 

 fornia, and within a year he was out 

 in San Francisco, in business with an- 

 other partner, who in this case proved 

 to be his lifelong friend. He remained 

 there but a short time, and came back 

 to the scenes of his childhood. On his 

 return he started a mercantile busi- 

 ness, and was one of the foremost busi- 

 ness men in Stamford. He was suc- 

 cessful financially, but success in busi- 

 ness life did not mean happiness to 

 him. He had lost two brothers, and 

 his wife, a woman of culture and edu- 

 cation, was taken away and confined 

 in a sanitarium. He sold out his busi- 

 ness to travel with her, hoping that a 

 change would keep off the dreaded ill- 

 ness. He was unsuccessful. 



Heartbroken, he sought peace and 

 comfort in the hills which surrounded 

 the old homestead where he was born. 

 Under the old maple tree which is still 

 standing in front of the homestead he 

 used to entertain me with reminiscen- 

 ces of his boyhood, and I would listen 

 for hours to what to me were fairy 

 tales. Often he would tell of the un- 

 told numbers of pickerel to be caught 

 in the river, and how the woods were 

 alive with game. Those were the good 

 old days in New England when one 

 could say with Whittier : 



"Mine the sand rimmed pickerel pond; 

 Mine the walnut slopes beyond." 



With children he was always a favor- 

 ite, and the Christmas preceding his 

 death he assumed the role of Santa 

 at the entertainment at the little white 

 schoolhouse in Roxbury. 



Slowly but definitely the name on 

 the stone suggested a little volume of 



his poems which some one had tenderly 

 collected and called "Sweet-brier 

 Petals," and there we learned some- 

 thing of the life of one who, though 

 dreamer and idealist, had somehow un- 

 consciously blended the simple things 

 of nature with the ''big," little things 

 of everyday life. What matter that his 

 business career had brought him all 

 kinds of success, all kinds of failure; 

 that he had mingled with many people 

 and traveled in distant lands? Thus 

 simply he wished to be remembered. 

 In one of his stanzas he writes : 



"Fiction and dreams are as nothing, 

 Reality drives all away." 



And yet did he succumb to the reality 

 he somehow confused with misfortune, 

 or did the dreams rather become to him 

 a beautiful reality unawares? He was 

 hardly a naturalist and yet through all 

 the poems (and he wrote only during 

 the last retrospective years of his life) 

 there is always an unconscious idealism 

 of the little dwellers in the out-of- 

 doors, a wonderful reverence for each 

 inconspicuous blossom. The practi- 

 calities of life always asserted them- 

 selves, sometimes in humorous combi- 

 nation with the curious fantasies he 

 wove about the life in wood and 

 meadow. The lilac, he saw looking 

 longingly in through the window 

 where it was warm ; it was the wild 

 rose that wilfully made the little girl 

 late for school ; and even the clouds 

 looked mockingly back at him as they 

 floated awav to the west. 



It may have been some such uncon- 

 scious mingling of the ideal with the 

 real, of humor and pathos, that induced 

 him to choose for a monument "as an- 

 cient as the sun," this sober grey rock 

 on a Connecticut hillside. 



He was always fond of — but prob- 

 ably it would only be fitting to quote 

 from Grey's "Elegy in a Country 

 Churchyard" : 



"No further seek his merits to disclose, 



Or draw his frailties from their dread 

 abode : 

 There they alike in trembling hope repose, 



The bosom of his Father and his God." 



