Another comer from the anvil, a strong, cheery, blunt, warm-hearted man, deeply in love with the truth of the Gospel, and running over with zeal in his advocacy of it, was Rev. EMMONS PARTRIDGE. He was superintendent of the Sunday school in the First Universalist church in Providence, R. I., while Rev. David Pickering was its pastor. He entered the ministry with but little scholarly preparation for it; but somehow, by divine grace, he did quite an acceptable work as a missionary and as pastor of a number of societies. God chooses his own instruments in his work, and this minister was one. Without the graces of oratory, he was a plain and often instructive preacher, because he was usually highly charged with his subject and eager to declare it to his hearers. If his illustrations were sometimes homely, they were usually to the point, and if they excited a smile carried a conviction. He was ready in expedients, if these were necessary, to win the good will of his neighbors who might be strongly prejudiced against his theology. "I had hard work," said he, "to get the kind attention of one man. I tried many ways: but at last, as we were both very much interested in raising rare kinds of poultry, I opened his heart towards me by occasional exchanges of choice eggs with him!" He could meet pulpit embarrassments coolly and more successfully than others might have done. Lecturing one evening in his pulpit at Watertown, Mass., he came to a place in his manuscript where the matter was confusedly mixed. The leaves had been wrongly stitched together, and he vainly tried to put them in order. Despairing of this, he quietly and quaintly remarked, "Well, this is strange. I thought I put these leaves in as they ought to be, but they are so mixed that I can't make anything out of them. I think I will say the rest without the notes!" and he did, to the satisfaction as well as amusement of the audience. He died somewhat advanced in years, highly esteemed by all who knew him.
Rev. WILLIAM I. REESE began to preach in Central New York, in Onondaga County, and was ordained at the session of the Cayuga Universalist Association in 1824. For a few years he was the minister of the Universalist societies in East and North Bloomfield, and then of the church in Portland, Me. He went to Buffalo on call of the church there in the early spring of 1834, and there in the succeeding summer his earthly ministry suddenly came to a close. It was the second year of that terrible visitation, the Asiatic cholera, and the city to which he had only just removed was awfully ravaged by the sweep of the dark-winged pestilence. Unfalteringly at his post of duty in all those dark days, devoting himself to loving ministries among sick and suffering and dying people, showing himself everywhere an angel of mercy and consolation, he fell a victim at last to the desolating scourge, and in the prime of his grand manhood, the good fight fought, the faith kept, the course finished, he passed on to receive his crown, and to be enrolled among the brightest and most faithful of ministering spirits.