Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/406

 370 THE GRANITE MOxNTHLY.

the Graxitk IMonthlv seems a most appropriate tablet on which to register some brief account of him.

Stephen Symonds Foster was born in Canterbury, in November, 1S09. His father was Col. Asa Foster, of Revolutionary memory, and of most amiable and excellent qualities and endowments. Mrs. Foster, too, was remarkable for sweetness of disposition and fine culture for her time, joined to elegance and beauty of person, lasting to great age; both herself and husband almost com- pleting a century. Stephen was the ninth child in a family of thirteen. The old homestead is in the north part of Canterbury, on a beautiful hillside, over- looking a long stretch of the Merrimack river valley, including Concord, and a wide view east and west, as well as south. It includes several hundred acres, and is still owned by one of the Foster brothers.

Stephen left it early and learned the trade of a carpenter and builder. In that, however, he did not come to his hfe occupation. His parents were most de- vout and exemplary niembers of the Congregational church, to which he also was joined in youthful years. At that time, the call for ministers and missionaries, especially to occupy the new opening field at the West, called then " the great Valley of the Mississippi," was loud and earnest. At twenty-two he heard and heeded it, and immediately entered on a course of collegiate study to that end, and it is only just to say that a more consistent, conscientious, divinely consecra- ted spirit never set itself to prepare for that then counted holiest of callings. Though assenting to the creed and covenant of his denomination, his whole rule of practical life and work was the "Sermon on the Mount," as interpreted and illustrated in the life and death of its Author.

With him " Love your enemies " was more than words, and " Resist not evil " was not returning evil, nor inflicting penalties under human enactments. And he went early to prison for non-appearance at military parade, armed with wea- pons of death.

In Dartmouth College he was called to perform military service. On Chris- tian principles he declined and was arrested and dragged away to jail. So bad were theroadsthat apart of the way the sheriff was compelled to ask him to leave the carriage and walk. He would cheerfully have walked all the way, as once did George Fox, good naturedly telling the officer, "Thee need not go thyself; send thy boy, I know the way." For Foster feared no prison cells. He had earnest work in hand which led through many of them in subsequent years.

Eternal Goodness might have had objects in view in sending him to Haver- hill, for he found the jail in a condition to demand the hand of a Hercules as in the "Augean" stables for its cleansing. His companions there were poor debt- ors, as well as thieves, murderers, and lesser felons. One man so gained his confidence as to whisper in his ear that on his hands was the blood of murder, though none knew it but himself. Another poor wretch had been so long con- fined by illness to his miserable bed, that it literally swarmed with vermin, crawling from his putrid sores.

Foster wrote and sent to the world such a letter as i'ew but he could vv-rite, and wakened general horror and indignation wherever it was read, and a cleans- ing operation was forthwith instituted. And the filth on the floor was found so deep, and so hard trodden, that strong men had to come with pick-axes and dig it up. And that jail was not only revolutionized, but the whole prison sys- tem of the state, from that time, began to be reformed; and imprisonment for debt was soon heard of here no more.

His college studies closed, he entered for a theological course, the Union Seminary in New York. Soon afterward there was threatened war between our country and Great Britain, over a short stretch of the Northeastern boundary line, about which the two nations had disputed for half a century. Wholly

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