Extract from a letter to one of his married daughters:— “TUNBRIDGE WELLS, _August_ 3_rd_, 1893. “We thank Him also very heartily for the happy week spent with you. It was absolutely impossible that greater care and kindness should have been shown to the old man, and I wish you to know how successful you were in giving me a comfortable, pleasant, and happy week, so that I was well repaid for the effort of the two long journeys, and shall ever retain a happy memory of that pleasant visit. “I was very glad to see as much as I did of the three dear sons, and felt exceedingly interested for them all, as I could see in each one that he had a special claim on our loving and earnest prayers. “It was also a great gratification to me to make the acquaintance of your future daughter. Oh, how I hope that the voice of rejoicing and salvation will be in their ‘tabernacle’! With dear love to them all, to the two boys arriving from school, and above all to yourselves at the head of such a family, “Your most loving Father, “E. HOARE.” The autumn of 1893 was remarkable for the number of visits which Mr. Hoare paid among relatives in Norfolk and elsewhere. He spoke of it as one of the pleasantest holidays that he had ever spent. Earlham, his mother’s old home, a name so familiar to many through Mr. Hare’s recent volumes on the Gurney family, was revisited, and he delighted in pointing out places in the house that reminded him of childish romps and adventures. A week was spent at Cromer, where, as usual, a great gathering of the clans took place. Here he met his beloved sister-in-law Lady Parry, and, at the house of his favourite cousin, Lady Buxton, he gave a Bible-reading in her spacious drawing-room to a gathering of some fifty or sixty friends and relatives. An eye-witness has described this impressive scene. The old man, blind, but mighty in the Scriptures, took for his subject the prayers for “teaching” contained in the 119th Psalm, and those who listened felt that he had been taught of God, and that another prayer in the same Psalm had been answered in his case: God had opened his eyes and permitted him to see wondrous things in His law. The Sunday following he preached in the grand old church at Cromer. Many remember that occasion; and when the writer paid a visit to that place a year later, he met an old man who spoke of this sermon with enthusiasm, and said that he thought it one of the best that he had ever heard from the aged preacher’s lips. No less than seven homes of his children and relatives were visited by him at this time, and it was from one of them, towards the close of this pleasant holiday, that the following letter to one of his daughters was written:—