Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

OUR SPRINGTIME 121
Children and children's children come
From near and far away,
To crown with golden memories
The golden wedding day.
Old Father Time the bridegroom's hair
With frost has sprinkled well;
If on her head some flakes were shed
They melted as they fell.
But heads may bear the touch of Time
'Gainst which the heart is proof,
As fires burn brightest on the hearth
When snow lies on the roof.
The common lot of life is that
Which greatest blessing yields;
With joy and pain God blessed their lives,
With sun and rain their fields.
They sowed good seed in life's fair spring,
They toiled for you and me;
Honor and love and gratitude.
These shall their harvest be.
Long may their presence linger yet
Within this peaceful home,
And oft around their happy hearth
The gray-haired children come.
May health and cheer attend them here,
May blessings never cease,
Their ways be ways of pleasantness
And all their paths be peace.
Sometimes I can but stop and say, "The dear old days!"
So much of simplicity, of household love, of freedom from
the bonds of what we now call "society"! How sweet were
the days of our childhood in that unpretentious home our
parents made for us! Our old grandfather still tarried by our
fireside, but his days were numbered and I have a clear remembrance
of his passing in our life's springtime. Early
one winter in our southern Ohio, before the holidays, father
was getting ready for an evangelistic tour which would include
some two weeks. While making preparations to leave
us he became filled with the most gloomy forebodings, and