The Greenes of Rhode Island, with historical records of English ...

George Sears Greene.
active practice of his profession was practically given up in 1883, when he
moved his residence to Morristown, N. J., remaining there until his death
in 1899. His only datighter had married an officer of the navy, Lieutenant
Murray S. Day, whose father, General Hannibal Day, U. S. A., had been
graduated at West Point in the same class of 1823-. They had not again
met until their children were married nearly fifty years later ; and at the
close of their life the two classmates came together in a joint home made
for them by the widowed daughter. General Day's wife died there in
1881, my mother in 1883, General Day in 1891, and my father in 1899.
In his Morristown home (with seldom a week passing without one or more
visits to New York), my father passed the closing years of his life, occupied
chiefly with genealogical researches and the preparation of the data published
in this book concerning the Greene family. His summers were passed on
Narragansett Bay, which he always contended to be the most beautiful
sheet of water in the world, and the climate of its islands and shores the most
salubrious. The tenacity with which he retained his mental and physical vigor
was phenomenal. His successive birthdays, from his ninetieth to his ninetyseventh
year, were passed without any impairment of his vision or his hearing,
and with his memory defective only as to the few years immediately
preceding. He was capable of long walks and of exhausting travel, and it
was necessary to remonstrate frequently with him against his habit of getting
on and off street cars while in motion. In the summer of 1893 there was a
large reunion of the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, thirty years after
and my father, being then ninety-two years of age, was chosen
the battle ;
as Grand Marshal of the parade. He was most cordially received by his
old comrades, and performed the duties of the day without fatigue.
At the request of his friends he was photographed on every birthday
after ninety. The (frontispiec?) reproduction is from the photograph
taken at the close of his ninety-first year; the alertness of the eye and the
vigor of the expression are extraordinary. As with his body, so with his
mind and heart, they were ever young. The querulousness of old age never
came to him. All of his contemporaries had passed away years before his
own death, but his sympathies and affiliations were with younger men, and
his interest in their aft'airs and in the events and questions of the day and
year in which he was living, was keen, intelligent, and kindly. His courtesy
to women was bred in a less busy age, but it lasted with his life, and to the
end he could never retain his seat in a public convej'ance while a woman
was standing. His unselfishness in all his relations with his children and his
friends, was unsurpassed. His consistent belief in the Christian religion was
never shaken , and
his efforts to follow its precepts in his daily life never flagged.