When I was a little child, Said my passionate nurse, and wild: "Wash you, children, clean and white; God may call you any night."
Close my tender brother clung, While I said with doubtful tongue: "No, we cannot die so soon; For you told, the other noon,
"Of those months in order fine That should make the earth divine. I've not seen, scarce five years old, Months like those of which you told."
Softly, then, the woman's hand Loosed my frock from silken band, Tender smoothed the fiery head, Often shamed for ringlets red. Somewhat gently did she say, "Child, those months are every day."
Still, methinks, I wait in fear, For that wonder-glorious year-- For a spring without a storm, Summer honey-dewed and warm, Autumn of robuster strength, Winter piled in crystal length.
I will wash me clean and white; God may call me any night. I must tell Him when I go His great year is yet to know-- Year when working of the race Shall match Creation's dial face; Each hour be born of music's chime, And Truth eternal told in Time.
Lieutenant-Colonel Ward had ten children, of whom seven lived to grow up. The fifth child and son was Samuel, our mother's father, born in Warwick, Rhode Island, May 1, 1786. When he was four years old, the family moved to New York, where the Colonel and his brother established themselves as merchants under the firm name of Samuel Ward & Brother.
The firm was only moderately successful; the children came fast. With his narrow income it was not possible for the father to give his boy the college education he desired; so at fourteen, fresh from the common schools, Samuel entered as a clerk the banking house of Prime & King. While still a mere lad, an old friend of the family asked him what he meant to be when he came to man's estate.
"I mean to be one of the first bankers in the United States!" replied Samuel.
At the age of twenty-two he became a partner in the firm, which was thereafter known as Prime, Ward & King.
In a memoir of our grandfather, the partner who survived him, Mr. Charles King, says:--
"Money was the commodity in which Mr. Ward dealt, and if, as is hardly to be disputed, money be the root of all evil, it is also, in hands that know how to use it worthily, the instrument of much good. There exist undoubtedly, in regard to the trade in money, and respecting those engaged in it, many and absurd prejudices, inherited in part from ancient error, and fomented and kept alive by the jealousies of ignorance and indigence. It is therefore no small triumph to have lived down, as Mr. Ward did, this prejudice, and to have forced upon the community in the midst of which he resided, and upon all brought into connexion with him, the conviction that commerce in money, like commerce in general, is, to a lofty spirit, lofty and ennobling, and is valued more for the power it confers, of promoting liberal and beneficent enterprises, and of conducing to the welfare and prosperity of society, than for the means of individual and selfish gratification or indulgence."