Lydia Maria Child, Isaac T. Hopper: a true life

[459] easily yielded, even on that point, as soon as he saw their happiness was at stake. When one of his sons married into a family educated under influences totally foreign to Quaker principles, he was somewhat disturbed. But he at once adopted the bride as a beloved daughter of his heart; and she ever after proved a lovely and thornless Rose in the pathway of his life. Great was his satisfaction when he discovered that she was grandchild of Dr. William Rogers, Professor of English and Oratory in the University of Pennsylvania, who, sixty years before, had preached the first sermon to inmates of the State Prison, in Philadelphia. That good and gifted clergyman was associated with his earliest recollections; for when he was on one of his pleasant visits to his uncle Tatem, at six years old, he went to meeting with him for the first time, and was seated on a stool between his knees. The proceedings were a great novelty to him; for Dr. Rogers was the first minister he ever saw in a pulpit. He never forgot the text of that sermon. I often heard him repeat it, during the last years of his life. The remembrance of these incidents, and the great respect he had for the character of the prison missionary, at once established in his mind a claim of old relationship between him and the new inmate of his household.

He had the custom of sitting with his wife on the front-door-step during the summer twilight, to catch