It was with very peculiar feelings of pleasure mingled with sadness that I read what was done by you at your meeting. The distance that separated me from you all adds a peculiar emphasis to my feelings, suggestive of loneliness. I have never been homesick in China. I would not be elsewhere than where I am, nor doing any other work than what I am doing. Yet when I read over the account of that meeting in Canonsburg my feelings were such as I have rarely had before. Separated by half the circumference of the globe for full forty-four years, yet in the retrospect the friendship formed in these years of fellowship in study seems to grow fresher and stronger as our numbers grow less. A busy life gives little time for retrospection, yet I often think of college days and college friends. Very few things in my early life have preserved their impression so well. I can still repeat the roll of our class, and I remember well how we sat in that old recitation room of Professor Jones [physics and chemistry]. I am in the second half of my seventy-second year, strong and well. China has agreed with me. I have spent my life itinerating, teaching and translating, with chief strength on teaching. But with us all who are left, the meridian of life is past, and the evening draws on. Yet a few of us have still some work to do. Let us strive to do it well, and add what we can to the aggregate achievement of the class’s life work—a record of which I trust none of us may be ashamed. In the unanticipated privilege of writing this book I am trying to fulfill that wish of our revered classmate. III FINDING HIS LIFE WORK “From my youth I had the missionary work before me as a dim vision. A half-formed resolution was all the while in my mind, though I spoke of it to no one. But for this it is questionable whether I would have given up teaching to go to the Seminary. After long consideration and many prayers I offered myself to the Board, and was accepted.”—AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH for college class anniversary, 1897. In the four sentences at the head of this chapter we have a condensed outline of the process by which Calvin Mateer came to be a foreign missionary. In his case it did not, as in the antecedent experience of most other clergymen who have given themselves to this work, start with an attraction first toward the ministry, and then toward the missionary service; but just the reverse. In order to understand this we need to go back again to “the old home,” and especially to his mother. We are fortunate here in having the veil of the past lifted by Mrs. Kirkwood, as one outside of the family could not do, or, even if he could, would hesitate to do.