16 LIFE OF BENJAMIN SILLIMAN. 



rection ! " These effusions of the dying Christian were fol- 

 lowed, or perhaps preceded, by a fervent prayer for him- 

 self, for us his children, and for our dear mother. He 

 prayed for forgiveness of his own unworthiness. How 

 beautiful, how consoling was this closing scene ! His sun 

 broke out from the clouds, and shone with cheering splen- 

 dor, and then the night of death closed in 



The morning after his death, our heavenly - minded 

 mother sat down in the room where our father lay a 

 corpse, and taking her two young sons, one on either hand, 

 read to us passages of Scripture containing God's promises 

 to the widow and fatherless. During her widowhood, in 

 the absence of male friends of proper age and feelings, she 

 prayed aloud with us and in the family, using her own 



language The earnest injunction of our dying 



father was most faithfully fulfilled by the best of mothers. 

 During the twenty-eight years that she survived my father, 

 she was at liberty during twenty-one of those years to live 

 most of the time with her children in their families, and 

 she was ever received as an angel of love. She was indeed 

 the best of mothers ; and she, chiefly from our limited pa- 

 ternal inheritance, courageously gave us brothers a public 

 education, while the solvency of our father's estate was still 

 hanging in doubt, although it proved in the end solvent, 

 and but for the Revolution would have been ample. Her 

 beautiful, benignant portrait continues to smile upon us 

 from the wall of the drawing-room of our house ; and had I 

 a Cowper's poetical talent, as I have his filial love, I too 

 would dedicate " a poem to my mother's picture." 



My recollections of my childhood and early youth will 

 be perhaps unmethodical, and will often present my only 

 brother of the whole blood, as we were almost constant 

 companions from our infancy until we had finished our 

 college education, when I was nearly seventeen, and he 

 almost nineteen years old. 



