Page:Letters of Life.djvu/248

236 loved band, true as the tribes of Israel to Mount Zion, gathered in their dedicated grove, with kind wishes and prayers for her who rode the "tossing, melancholy main," and from the far-off, crested billow, breathed for them, in the voice of affection, her blended greeting and adieu.

Our latest celebration, the forty-fifth, seemed to me to possess features of peculiar interest. Diminished numbers, and mournful associations connected with the grove, of those who must meet us there no more, suggested the propriety of a different gathering-place, and my own quiet parlors were the accepted substitute. Thither they came, the lovely and beloved. A few of them were from other cities, and from distant States. Thirty-three out of our circle had entered that angelic class, than which they had here stood but a "little lower." The original eighty-four were now more than twice outnumbered in the second generation.

Yet in our hearts there was no change. Each one of us, perchance, had hidden there some cypress-bud. But we came not together for sadness. Every face was wreathed in smiles. We summoned the past, and it returned without a shadow or a thorn. One, Mrs. Emmeline Rockwell, who had preserved much of the beauty and grace of early prime, and who, in her journey from the Hudson River, had been fourteen hours in the cars, said, with a sparkle in her expressive black eye, she was "not at all fatigued, and