Did time and general interest permit, the growth from year to year, and from district to district, in Manitoba might be traced; the special work of faithful missionaries might be given and their great services recounted. This is not our present purpose. The presbytery, in its early missionary plans in 1871, consisted of Revs. John Black, James Nisbet, William Fletcher, John McNabb, and the writer. Mr. Nisbet was five hundred miles west, at Prince Albert, and the little knot of members seemed too small to face so large a work; but missionary after missionary was sent by the generous and patriotic home mission committee in Toronto. Prof. Hart, a missionary of the Church of Scotland in Canada, came to join us in the following year, and Rev. James Robertson two years after that. [Illustration: WINNIPEG IN 1870.] Frazer, Matheson, Donaldson, and Vincent were active members of presbytery and worthy foundation builders. McKellar, Bell and Stewart were a trio who did yeoman service in the splendid farming region of Portage la Prairie and Gladstone. Scott and Borthwick and Ross took hold of Southern Manitoba and laid the foundations of numerous congregations, such as Emerson, Carman, Morden and others, now self-sustaining and influential. Alex. Campbell, James Douglas, A. H. Cameron, and Alexander Smith all earned a good degree in the later seventies, and are still residents of the west. Such men as McGuire, Wellwood, Donald McRae, Hodnett, and Polson were hard-working pioneers in the last years in which John Black yet remained with us. St. Paul's list of worthies was well called a cloud of witnesses in his wonderful chapter in the Hebrews, and we honor those whose names have become world wide for their faith and self-sacrifice; but many of the names now mentioned are also those of men of unflinching courage, of splendid endurance, of godly lives, and truest influence. The fact that numbers of them, and others who have since come to the west, were willing to bury themselves in obscure mission stations for the sake of Christ, but showed them to be men of the same spirit as John Black, and their virtues call for admiration and regard. SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES. The great mission work, from 1871 to 1881, was of the most difficult and trying kind. The settlements were new, the people were very scattered, were strangers to one another, their resources were small, and mission work was carried on under the greatest disadvantages. But such faithful, self-denying work never goes unrewarded. During one-half of this decade the country suffered from the terrible plague of the grasshoppers. The new farmers all through the settlements were greatly discouraged. About the year 1875 there were thousands of settlers of Manitoba reduced to the scantiest fare. The writer recalls those dark days of the new settlement.