man, a sort of free minister, as I found, among the Quakers, very much given to think his own thoughts and take his own way.

But now another very dear memory clasps hands with these over which I have lingered. A longing took me to have the same welcome in the motherland and the churches there, where I began to preach in the later forties. I was getting on in years, had crossed the sea six times to see the kinsfolk and old friends, to wander over the moors and along the green lanes so familiar still, to hear the skylark singing in the lift of the blue, drop in to see the old friends who were left, and eat a bit of haver cake if there was any hanging on the bread flake,— to be a boy again, and then the young man to whom, as my faith stands also, the Lord said, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land which I will shew thee." And on every visit I had met old friends, members of the churches, who were right glad to see me I was sure; but on each visit, the number was still less, they had gone to their rest,— out of the body to God."

66

And always I had preached in our own church in Leeds, one of the best in our denomination, and most prosperous, as well as in other churches

of our order far and wide, so that I was quite well known, and might perhaps be entitled to the term an old man used in Western New York, who came forward after a lecture and said, “I should like to shake hands with you, sir: : you are quite notorious in these parts." We shook hands forthwith.

it

This was the situation when five years ago last summer I wanted to cross the sea once more, may well be for the last time,— crossed with the longing which had not abated, but with no hope that it would be made good. I had never whispered my desire to any man or woman in the old communion, or, so far as I remember, to any other man or woman, while, if I had told my secret to any friend, and he had asked me to name the churches in the old communion in which I would love of all things, or churches, in the world to be heard, I should have answered, These three, the old meeting-house in Addingham where I made my first effort and came to grief; the church in Ilkley, where I bid fair to make a good rail to stop the gaps; and the small meeting-house on the hill in the hamlet where I was raised. Our family had left many years before, but was still remembered in here and there a home. These would have been my first,

and, indeed my only, choice, while this is now my joy and my wonder,- that I was invited to preach in these three and no fourth, as if they alone had known my secret. About a week after I arrived in Leeds a gentleman came with the invitation from the first I have named, and would not hear me when, like a maiden who receives a proposal from the man she loves and means of course to accept, I was a little shy, saying I was a Unitarian, and, if I preached for them, it would make trouble, and so on. He just whistled my words down the wind. This was all settled, he said. The senior minister had said I should be right welcome, so had the people; and so I said, "All right," and took the service. It was a great congregation, filling the old chapel to the doors, if I might judge from what an old friend, a stone delver, whose tools I made and sharpened fifty years before, said, who told me he came to "t' chapel, but couldn't git in." Then the senior minister, Rev. Joseph Dawson, wrote me from Ilkley, where they had built a noble church and where I preached on the Sunday before we started to find our new home, bidding the old friends goodbye. He invited me most cordially to come and preach for them, and to be his guest in the

manse. I stayed with him and his good sunnyhearted helpmeet three days, and we communed together like brothers beloved; and, as when the priest from Canada stayed with Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, he says it was delightful to find how much of the divine truth they held in common, so I felt when I stayed those three days, all too brief, at the manse.

I have always kept in rather close touch with my old town, so that after the forty-eight years I was no stranger. Many old friends had gone and few were left, but the new and the old gave me as great welcome as my heart could desire.

There, on the hill in the small chapel, where no man remembered me, and only one woman, who went to her rest when this new year came in, there was the same heart-whole welcome. This is the story of what came to pass in the old mother church I had left in sorrow that it must be so, and was welcomed just as I was and had been through the many years to the good old mother's home and heart. And, as I turned my face hitherward, I said, "I have had my heart's desire."

XII

I wonder whether it was wise to wander away from these memories in my last script, as they follow each other in strict sequence, to tell you how the desire of my heart was given me in that warm welcome at the old home church at Milestown once and again, and then in the three churches of the old faith and fellowship with which my life was blended in the motherland.

The truth is the impulse to do this there and then was not to be resisted or to save them for a final chapter. It overcame me, as when we want to go at once and tell dear friends about some stroke of good fortune that has come to us we did not hope for that will make more sweet and fruitful the whole tenor of our life.

The warm welcome was given to me just as I was and must be in faith and fellowship to the end of my life, the boon I longed for, but must not ask for; while it may be this was one fair reason that in all the years of my ministry since I became what I am I had said no