36 PETER HENDERSON. ' 



most admired was the late Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 

 The great preacher's well-known love for flowers, brought 

 them first together over thirty years ago, and it was a 

 treat to see these two men, each so eminent in his own 

 sphere, become as enthusiastic as school boys over some 

 marvel or beauty in flower or leaf. 



While Mr. Henderson had handled for over thirty 

 consecutive years every tool used in the garden or 

 greenhouse, he never at any time possessed very great 

 muscular strength, but his nervous energy was simply 

 tremendous. The Scotch are often characterized as be- 

 ing clannish and unable to understand how any other 

 nationality can do a thing quite as well as themselves; 

 but here was a son of " Auld Scotia " broad enough to 

 quickly see and admit superiority in others. For in- 

 stance, Scotchman as he was, and retaining to the last a 

 great love for his native land, he always averred that 

 weight for weight, Irishmen were the strongest physi- 

 cally of any people he ever came in contact with. He 

 also always contended that no race under the sun could 

 handle the spade with the qiiickness and dexterity of the 

 Irish ; and at any cime in his long career you could have 

 paid him no higher compliment than to have told him 

 that, in that department of human endeavor, he could 

 handle a spade equal to an Irishman, which he could and 

 did. 



In the first portion of this sketch, reference was made 

 to the enormous number of letters he wrote during 

 his life-time, and it should have been there told, that for 

 at least the first twenty years of that time he made out 

 his own bills, kept his own books and filled the greater 

 part of the plant orders himself. When about the age of 

 fifty years, he began gradually to ease up in his personal 

 labor, but even in the last year of his life, the amount 

 of work he accomplished daily would have been un- 

 usual for most men of fifty. As far back as 1865, this 

 enormous amount of writing caused an attack of " pen 

 paralysis," or as it is sometimes called, " writer's cramp "; 

 by stopping all writing for four or five months it disap- 



