It takes courage to be a good citizen, and he had plenty of it.

He allowed no individual and no corporation to infringe his smallest right and escape unpunished.
He was very rich, and very generous, and benevolent, and he gave away his money with a prodigal hand; but if an individual or corporation infringed a right of his, to the value of ten cents, he would spend thousands of dollars' worth of time and labor and money and persistence on the matter, and would not lower his flag until he had won his battle or lost it.
He and Rev.Mr.Harris had been classmates in college, and to the day of Sage's death they were as fond of each other as an engaged pair.

It follows, without saying, that whenever Sage found an opportunity to play a joke upon Harris, Harris was sure to suffer.
Along about 1873 Sage fell a victim to an illness which reduced him to a skeleton, and defied all the efforts of the physicians to cure it.

He went to the Adirondacks and took Harris with him.

Sage had always been an active man, and he couldn't idle any day wholly away in inanition, but walked every day to the limit of his strength.