Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 02.pdf/222

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yeremiah Sullivan Black. arm in a railroad accident in Kentucky in 1868, while on his way, in Judge Swayne's company, to attend a federal court in Texas. That injury disabled him in the use of one hand;,but with characteristic fortitude and energy he soon acquired ready use of the other; the autographs attached to the fron tispiece in this issue of the " Green Bag" show his signature before and after the accident. When his time came to die, in 1883, the deep religious faith that had tinged his whole life, his utterances, and his writings, and which so irradiated his character, did not fail him. He knew he had kept his own affairs at loose ends here, but ex pressed his confidence that " my business on the other side is well settled." There is nothing more pleasing in this great man's character than that his papers in his family's possession show him to have preserved more

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carefully than contracts with clients for enor mous fees such simple documents as this grave bargain entered into with his six-yearold grandson, — Bargain. Wheat-straw and calf-feed bargain. Poddy [the grandfather] to give feed for my calf, and I to give straw to bed his dogs. Jere Clayton. Agreed to, 10 June, 1879.

J. S. B.

Unless it be this dying prayer, which passed his unsullied lips in the hour of his supreme suffering, when with his wife's hand pressed in his own he uttered these words : "O thou beloved and most merciful Father, from whom I had my being and in whom I ever trusted, grant, if it be thy will, that I no longer suffer this agony, and that I be speedily called home to thee. And, O God, bless and comfort this my Mary."