We have reached at last the end of our wanderings, and are as far south of the Equator as Geneva is north of it. But that only expresses our situation geographically, or as it would be if the two hemispheres were uniform, and the climate and conditions were the same at the same latitudes north and south. From the human point of view this city reminds one more of Inverness or Kirkwall, in its remoteness from the busy world, or I should rather say in its close vicinity to those desolate regions where man and his nearer kindred can find no dwelling place, and the only mammals are seals and whales. A hundred-and-thirty miles further south is the town of Invercagill, with some 10,000 inhabitants, but (I am told) with such broad streets and handsome buildings as many an English town of ten times the population does not possess. Below this is Stewart Island, mountainous and forest clad, and further on, the wild waste of ocean with no boundary but the great ice barrier which page 32 hides the Antarctic continent, nursery of the penguin and the albatross. So near we seem to the end of man's interests in the globe he inhabits and thinks to be his own. So far away from you, dear friends, who dwell in the very midst of the stir and whirl of human affairs.

It was our hope and purpose to take the boat on our homeward way on the 23rd, but after much anxious deliberation, I decided to stay on till October the 14th, for there was work to be done here, and having come so far to do it, it seemed a pity to leave it half done. A week more would have been enough, but there was no choice, as the boats on which we had secured our passage sail at intervals of three weeks. This decision will deprive us of home letters for a long time, and how often our thoughts will turn to the Post Office at San Francisco, where we know they will be waiting unclaimed; and we shall have to hurry through America, instead of taking a month on the way as we hoped to do. But I think it was the right thing to do, and I hope you will approve it. We shall be due in California on October 31st, and in Leeds certainly by the end of November.

It is with a feeling of embarrassed incredulity that I keep comparing my own age with that of the cities here. Hitherto, I have passed my life in places which were homes of men long before any records were kept, or there was yet any thought of providing for the curiosity of after-comers. Who knows ought of the men, Angles or Britons, who first made their homes by the ferry on the Aire? Or of the tattoed page 33 dwellers by the Thames, who built a stockade to protect the hamlet, which was to be London, from assault of pirates of the river, or neighbours of the marsh and forest? But here I find myself as old or older than the cities which receive me. The train brings me on my way to them; the electric tram conveys me through their streets, and electric light makes the broad ways bright at night; there is nothing wanting of all the arts and luxuries of our latest civilization, the outcome of thousands of years of experience and experiment. Yet when I was born, the bush and the swamp held immemorial tenancy of the sites on which they are builded to be homes of commerce and manufacture, centres of industry to the wide lands around rich in pasture and in mineral. Of the four chief cities of New Zealand, Wellington and Auckland were founded in 1840. The first settlers arrived at Dunedin and Christchurch when I was already advanced to Latin grammar! It seems so incongruous this comparison of age between an individual who will be very old if he survives fourscore, and homes of these multitudes built for generations yet unborn and with due provision for its dead! And I say to myself—Contemporary of great and thriving cities I will be young and strong too in spite of years, and will return to my work with new vigour and hope of yet many years of work to come!

Some of you I am sure will have remembered that with the month of October, in which this letter will reach you, I begin the twenty-ninth year of my Ministry at Mill Hill. It is the whole life-time of page 34 many a young man now engaged in the ministry of religion or other divine service; and I thank God, with tears in my eyes, that He has accorded me so great a honour. I will not depreciate myself to you; you know pretty well what I am, better and worse. And I know too and will not pretend that I am any worse than I am, or seek to be thought better. But we shall be agreed on this, that my immediate predecessors were in no way inferior to me in merits or talent, yet to not one of them was so long a term of honoured Ministry among you allowed. So we get, not according to our deserts, but each one as it pleases The Most High to give. And we must take whatever we get with thankfulness and humility—with the more humility if we get the more, for the largeness of the honour makes more striking the small worth of him who receives it.

When you read this we shall be at Honolulu or somewhere among the Isles of the Pacific. At present we think of you as half a day behind us, and on Sunday we remember that Morning Service is going on at Mill Hill when we are thinking of going to bed; but before we reach the islands we put the calendar back a whole day, and so you will be twelve hours ahead of us and we shall keep on gaining time till we get home.

C.H.