While the author was at Constantinople, he received a letter from Dr. Grant, stating how much his presence was needed, for a time, by his children at home. The case being urgent, he was encouraged to return and was preparing for this, when his gracious Lord called him into his presence above. The tidings of his dangerous sickness awakened much interest in Mosul. People of every rank, men of all sects and religions, watched the progress of his disease with the most earnest anxiety. The French Consul visited him almost daily. The Turkish authorities sent to inquire for him, and some came in person. One, who arrived immediately after his decease, could not refrain from tears when he heard of it. A leading Jacobite remarked, that all Mosul was weeping. The poor Patriarch, roused to a sense of his loss, exclaimed, "My country and my people are gone! Nothing remains to me but God!" Those who have attentively read the preceding history will need nothing more to set forth the character of this eminent servant of Christ. His courage, his calmness and yet firmness of purpose, his skill in the healing art, his devotion to the cause of his Saviour, his tact in winning the confidence even of those who never before trusted their own friends, his fearlessness in the presence of unscrupulous and cruel men and his ascendency over them, his lively faith under appalling discouragements, and his unyielding perseverance, form an array of excellence rarely combined in one man. Like the holy Apostle, he was "in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." Yet was he not cast down by these things. He regarded them as incidental to his calling of God in Christ Jesus; and in the pursuit of this heavenly calling, he was more happy in the savage wilds of Koordistan, than he would have been in the most favored portions of his native land. Mr. Laurie and Dr. Smith, the surviving brethren at Mosul, entered the mountains in the summer of 1844, explored the district of Tiary, and visited Nurullah Bey at Birchullah above Julamerk. Wherever they went among the Nestorians, they found a painful scene of desolation. On their return to Mosul, they forwarded their journal and a summary view of the facts, and asked the Committee to decide whether to continue the effort to approach the Nestorians from the west, and the Committee now forwarded definite instructions to discontinue this branch of the mission.1 They proceeded to Beirut in Syria, accompanied by Mrs. Hinsdale, who had been bereaved of her only child. Mr. Laurie became a member of the Syrian mission, and Dr. Smith of the Armenian; and Mrs. Hinsdale was for some time employed in the instruction of missionary children at Constantinople. 1 _Missionary Herald_, 1845, pp. 116-125.