So many relatives and acquaintances of Dr. Mateer have contributed valuable material, on which I have drawn freely, that I dare not try to mention them here by name. It is due, however, to Mrs. J. M. Kirkwood to acknowledge that much of the chapter on “The Old Home” is based on a monograph she prepared in advance of the writing of this biography. It is due also to Mrs. Ada H. Mateer to acknowledge the very extensive and varied assistance which she has rendered in the writing of this book: first, by putting the material already on hand into such shape that the biographer’s labors have been immensely lightened, and later, by furnishing with her own pen much additional information, and by her wise, practical suggestions. D. W. F. WASHINGTON, 1911 I THE OLD HOME “There are all the fond recollections and associations of my youth.”—JOURNAL, March 4, 1857. Calvin Wilson Mateer, of whose life and work this book is to tell, was born in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, near Shiremanstown, a few miles west of Harrisburg, on January 9, 1836. This Cumberland valley, in which he first saw the light, is one of the fairest regions in all our country. Beginning at the great, broad Susquehanna, almost in sight of his birthplace, it stretches far away, a little to the southwest, on past Chambersburg, and across the state line, and by way of Hagerstown, to its other boundary, drawn by a second and equally majestic stream, the historic Potomac. Physically considered, the splendid Shenandoah valley, still beyond in Virginia, is a further extension of the same depression. It is throughout a most attractive panorama of gently rolling slopes and vales, of fertile and highly cultivated farms, of great springs of purest water and of purling brooks, of little parks of trees spared by the woodman’s ax, of comfortable and tasteful rural homes, of prosperous towns and villages where church spires and school buildings and the conveniences of modern civilization bear witness to the high character of the people,—all of this usually set like a picture in a framework of the blue and not very rugged, or very high, wooded mountains between which, in their more or less broken ranges, the entire valley lies. True, it was winter when this infant first looked out on that world about him, but it was only waiting for spring to take off its swaddling of white, and to clothe it with many-hued garments. Twenty-eight years afterward, almost to the very day, he, cast ashore on the coast of China, was struggling over the roadless and snow covered and, to him, wholly unknown ground toward the place near which he was to do the work of his life, and where his body rests in the grave. When he died, in his seventy-third year, the spiritual spring for which he had prayed and longed and labored had not yet fully come, but there were many indications of its not distant approach.