Before I bid a last farewell to your Southern seas and stars I must write to express, as well as I can in words, the deep feelings of thankfulness and esteem and affection which I entertain in my heart towards you and your congregation. As I watched Auckland faint into a grey spot under Mt. Eden and then disappear behind a corner of land, then kept my eyes on Rangitoto, the scene of our pleasant picnic, till it faded on the horizon, I wondered how I could have become so attached to a place and people which a few weeks ago were all unknown to me. I came to you a stranger, but after the first evening I felt myself a friend; and the ties then made were strengthened with every day I spent among you. Had I parted from you all at the end of my first visit, to return no more, I should have taken with me kindliest remembrances of my short stay, but it was the last week which knit me to you by links of abiding affection. I mourn that memory is so feeble, and that your names and faces will not remain as vividly as they at present do. But though I may forget this and that one, I shall never forget you as a body while memory lasts. You have been very good to me, and it comforts to recall, now that my mission is at end, your page 39 repeated assurances that I have been of some good to you. If I had come merely to see and enjoy myself, I should have been completely satisfied with my visit. There was no drawback to the pleasure of my nine weeks' stay in New Zealand, except that the weather was not always what I could have wished for. It is the consciousness that I went for your sake and not for my own, and that I am responsible for your having profited by my efforts, which would trouble me, were it not for your kind assurance.

I shall write again from England. Meanwhile, I send to you all—to the children, to the young men and maidens, to the women and the men—my last wish as I saw Auckland disappear from sight—God bless you!