Months before that date of February 18th, on which their golden wedding was to be celebrated, Mr. and Mrs. Coffin had secured my promise that I should be present. Coming on to Boston, I led the morning worship in the Eliot Church of Newton, which is named after the apostle of the Indians, the quarter-millennial anniversary of the beginning of whose work at Nonantum has just been celebrated. In the afternoon, I had the pleasure of looking into the faces of three score or more of my former Shawmut parishioners in the Casino hall in Beaconsfield Terrace. Mr. Coffin had, from the first, fully agreed with the writer in believing that a Congregational church should be formed in the Reservoir district, which had, he predicted, a brilliant and substantial future. He was among the very first to move for the sale of the old property on Tremont Street, and he personally prepared the petition to the Legislature of Massachusetts for permission to sell and move. Afterwards, when the new enterprise seemed to have been abandoned, he listened to the call of duty and remained in Shawmut Church. When he became a resident in Brookline, feeling it still his duty to work and toil, to break new paths, to make the road straight for his Master, rather than to sit down at ease in Zion, he cast his lot in with a little company of those who, though few and without wealth, bravely and hopefully resolved to form a church where it was needed. On November 3d, they first gathered for worship, and one year later, November 4, 1896, the church was formed, with Rev. Harris G. Hale as pastor, and taking the historic, appropriate, but uncommon name, Leyden. Their first collection of money, as a thank-offering to God, was for Foreign Missions. On that afternoon of February 16th, Carleton was present, joining heartily in the worship. As usual, he listened with that wonderfully luminous face of his and that close attention to the discourse, which, like the cable-ships, ran out unseen telegraphy of sympathy. The service, and the usual warm grasping of hands and those pleasant social exchanges for which the Shawmut people were so noted, being over, some fifteen or twenty gathered in the hospitable library of M. F. Dickinson, Jr., whose home was but a few rods off, on the other side of Beacon Street. After a half hour of sparkling reminiscences of the dear old days in Shawmut, all had gone except the host, Mr. Coffin, and the biographer, who then had not even a passing thought of the work he was soon to do. As Carleton sat there in an easy chair before the wood-fire on the open hearth, his feet stretched out comfortably upon the tiles, and his two hands, with their finger and thumb tips together, as was his usual custom when good thinking and pleasant conversation went on together, he talked about the future of Boston and of Congregational Christianity.