It is a family saying, based upon the assertion of my eldest daughter, that “if mother were set down in the middle of the Desert of Sahara, and made to comprehend that she must spend the rest of her days there, she would, within ten minutes, begin to expatiate upon the many advantages of a dry climate as a residential region.” By the time we stayed our flight in Richmond, where we spent our Christmas, I took from the worn and harassed man of the hour the burden of explanation and defence of the reasons for tearing ourselves up by the roots and transplanting the tender vine into what some of our best wishers called, “alien soil.” I had worked myself into an honest defender of the Middle States in contradistinction to “Yankee land,” before we departed, bag, baggage, and baby, for the new home. Mr. Terhune had preached twice in Newark, in December, after formally accepting the call. We removed to that city in February of 1859. With the Saharan spirit in full flow, I met the welcoming “people”; settled in the house we bought in a pleasant quarter of the growing city—then claiming a population of less than seventy-five thousand—installed white servants; received and returned calls, and was, for the first time in my life, homesick at heart for three months. In the recollection of the eighteen years that succeeded that period of blind rebellion against the gentle leading which was, for us, wisdom and loving-kindness throughout, I write down the confession in shame and confusion of face, and abasement of soul. I stay the course of the narrative at this point to record, devoutly and gratefully, that never had pastor and pastor’s wife, in any section of our land, a parish in which “pleasant places” did more richly abound. I would write down, yet more emphatically and thankfully, the amazing fact that, in the dozen-and-a-half years of my dwelling among them, I never had a word of unkind criticism of myself and my ways; not a remark that could wound or offend was ever addressed to me. I wish I might have that last paragraph engraved in golden capitals and set to the everlasting credit of that Ideal Parish! To this hour, I turn instinctively in times of joy and of sorrow, as to members of the true household of faith, to the comparatively small band of the once large congregation who are left alive upon the earth. For eighteen years I walked up the central aisle of the church, as I might tread the halls and chambers of my father’s house in that far Southern town, with the consciousness that we were surrounded by an atmosphere of affectionate appreciation, at once comforting and invigorating.