Who shall write hereafter the record of those days in the Society, and the distinguished men who met around it, and by their personal voice and presence and active co-operation honored and cheered the Society in their honorable work--Gallatin and Adams, and Clay and Webster --and our late honored and lamented President.1 Truly, "There were giants in those days." At that old table Judge Macdonald spent patient hours of quiet study over the files of old newspapers and other volumes illustrating the subjects of his investigation--recording slowly and with difficulty with his left hand the points of importance and various illustrations to be woven into the web of his future work. It was my custom to leave him during the intermedi-ate hours in which the library was closed, and my own duties required attention elsewhere, to pursue these assiduous and earnest researches. Most of you can doubtless recall his appearance--venerable and infirm, touching in its very infirmity, as he seemed when last with us in 1858, at the reading of his charming paper on the Danbury Expedition. But gradually he was deprived even of the ability to be with us in person, and the encroachments of disease compelled him

1This probably refers to Luther Bradish, LL.D., for many years President of the New York Historical Society, who died August 30, 1863. --EDITOR. 82 THE McDONALD PAPERS

to abandon the use of the pen and to dictate to an amanuensis the results of his long study and reflection. And so patiently he waited for the end of his long imprison-ment. He died on the morning of Sunday, the eighth of November 1863, not having quite completed his seventy-third year. I have often thought, as I saw him thus confined by the walls and fetters of physical infirmity, still cheerful and genial and happy in intellectual exercises and resources--of those lines of the old poet, "My mind to me a kingdom is; Such perfect joy therein I find."