The tenacity of the old gentleman’s memory was truly remarkable.  He often repeated letters, which he had written or received twenty years before on some memorable occasion; and if opportunity occurred to compare them with the originals, it would be found that he had scarcely varied a word.  He always maintained that he could distinctly remember some things, which happened before he was two years old.  One day, when his parents were absent, and Polly was busy about her work, he sat bolstered up in his cradle, when a sudden gust of wind blew a large piece of paper through the entry.  To his uneducated senses, it seemed to be a living creature, and he screamed violently.  It was several hours before he recovered from his extreme terror.  When his parents returned, he tried to make them understand how a strange thing had come into the house, and run, and jumped, and made a noise.  But his lisping language was so very imperfect, that they were unable to conjecture what had so frightened him.  For a long time after, he would break out into sudden screams, whenever the remembrance came over him.  At seventy-five years old, he told me he remembered exactly how the paper then appeared to him, and what sensations of terror it excited in his infant breast.

He had a large old-fashioned cow-bell, which was always rung to summon the family to their meals.  He resisted having one of more modern construction, because he said that pleasantly reminded him of the time when he was a boy, and used to drive the cows to pasture.  Sometimes, he rang it much longer than was necessary to summon the household.  On such occasions, I often observed him smiling while he stood shaking the bell; and he would say, “I am thinking how Polly looked, when the cow kicked her over; milk-pail and all.  I can see it just as if it happened yesterday.  O, what fun it was!”

He often spoke of the first slave whose escape he managed, in the days of his apprenticeship.  He was wont to exclaim, “How well I remember the anxious, imploring, look that poor fellow gave me, when I told him I would be his friend!  It rises up before me now.  If I were a painter, I could show it to thee.”

But clearly above all other things, did he remember every look and tone of his beloved Sarah; even in the days when they trudged to school together, hand in hand.  The recollection of this first love, closely intertwined with his first religious impressions, was the only flowery spot of romance in the old gentleman’s very practical character.  When he was seventy years of age, he showed me a piece of writing she had copied for him, when she was a girl of fourteen.  It was preserved in the self-same envelope, in which she sent it, and pinned with the same pin, long since blackened by age.  I said, “Be careful not to lose that pin.”

“Lose it!” he exclaimed.  “No money could tempt me to part with it.  I loved the very ground she trod upon.”

He was never weary of eulogizing her comely looks, beautiful manners, sound principles, and sensible conversation.  The worthy companion of his later life never seemed troubled by such remarks.  She not only “listened to a sister’s praises with unwounded ear,” but often added a heartfelt tribute to the virtues of her departed friend.