Page:Life of Isaiah V Williamson.djvu/160



N THE 7th of March, 1889, Isaiah V. Williamson journeyed on, and after many days, the city in which he lived woke to some realization of its loss. For eighty-six years he had lived most of his days in Philadelphia, and yet few knew or cared to know him until the last five years of his life. Big men were too busy with their own affairs and little men too narrow to do more than point to him as a shabby, stingy, old man, as if the bent figure and clothes were all of the man or as though the quoting of some one word or act of his indicated the whole of the man. The visible is not always final. Color blindness to character and worth is much more common than the ordinary defective vision. There is nothing simpler than to judge by appearances and burn a human being at the stake of mistaken judgment.

From Fallsington Four Corners' Village 136