This serious answer caused no little astonishment; for one naturally thinks of Doctor Hale as an author rather than as a hard-working minister. [Illustration: DOCTOR HALE IN HIS STUDY.] "I attach a great deal of importance to the weekly printing and circulating of sermons," he continued. "It is more than fifteen years since I began printing them for our people. It keeps a man at his best work. It does away with slipshod carelessness. I should advise every minister to print his sermons. The fact of it is," he continued, with increasing vivacity, "five-sixths of my work in this office is parish work. I am a person who has never lost sight of my profession. People complain that my books always carry a moral. I wouldn't write if they didn't." "How did you come to write--as an author, I mean?" "Until 1861 I was only known in Boston as an energetic minister of an active church. I didn't want anything else. I believe now, as then, that if anything is going to be done, it is to be done through that agency. Then the war came along. I was in the Massachusetts Rifle Corps, and," he said this with a pardonable twinkle of pride, "I have drilled a major-general. Then I was on the Sanitary Commission. To save the country--that brought me into public life, and I have never got back into simple parish life again. Then came 'The Man Without a Country.' In 1871 'Ten Times One is Ten' was published. From that book came a peculiarity of my life. It brought me into close contact with all parts of the world. From it sprang the 'Lend a Hand' and the 'King's Daughters,' and a dozen such working societies, and indirectly the Epworth League and the Christian Endeavor. They copied the idea, with many of my mottoes." The speaker stopped while the writer pondered how many a girl, from East to West and North to South, carried upon her throat a plain silver cross tied with a purple ribbon, her proudest ornament. It is an inspiring picture and comes quickly to call. To make an era in Christian self-surrender, to girdle the world with unselfish crosses, to hammer high purposes into young souls, that is a better life than to have written the best novel of the decade. "Yes," said Doctor Hale, with the authority of his threescore years and eleven, "the parish is at the basis of my life, and takes five-sixths of my time. All this would have been impossible without it." In these days, when some of our eminent critics consider a moral purpose detrimental to the literary value of a story, it is refreshing to learn from the mouth of one of our most popular authors that his success is due entirely to the inspiration of a Christian ideal. It takes the modern school of critics to pat the Lord Jesus Christ upon the back. Charles Kingsley and Doctor Hale will not be snuffed out by them because they have chosen to Christianize their literary work.