I did not attempt to make any answer to your letter before this because I have been for a long time under the weather and have neglected a great many matters which did not require immediate attention. While I have been confined to a very great extent to my room, I have had a great deal of time to devote to reflection and musing over earlier scenes and missionary experiences of my younger days. Your letter brought back very vividly the days of our missionary labors in the islands, where I was sent when only a boy, inexperienced in many things, and yet, through force of circumstances caused by the loss of both father and mother whose counsels I very sorely needed, with a training beyond my years caused by contact with hard necessity in those early pioneer days in a new country where but a few years before scarcely a white man had placed his foot. I recalled my travels across the desert and our journeyings to southern California and from there up to San Francisco; the dangers through which we passed because of hostile bands of Indians; laboring in California in order to get means to make the passage over the ocean to the appointed field of labor and the difficulties encountered after arriving there. I recalled the promises made to me by Brother Parley P. Pratt that I should receive the knowledge of the native language by the gift of God, and how it was fulfilled. I thought of the arrival of our boat and when the natives surrounded us as they came out in the harbor talking what appeared to me as an unintelligible gibberish, how it would be possible for me, or any one else, to learn to speak such a language and preach the Gospel to them in such a tongue. But the Lord blessed me and it was not many days before I was able to converse in the Hawaiian language and preach in my missionary journeyings among that dark, benighted but kind hearted people. I recalled not only the companionship of my friends, John R. Young, Silas Smith, my kinsman, Smith B. Thurston, Washington B. Rodgers, William W. Cluff, Francis A. Hammond and many others, but the many dark skinned natives whose friendship and brotherly love could not be surpassed. How my love went out to them! For are they not also the children of God, and of the seed of Abraham with a right to the promises made by the Lord to Israel? And did they not prove to us their worthiness and integrity even though they had not been taught and trained as we and were filled with the superstitions of their people which had come down for many generations. And farther back to the days of my childhood in these valleys, my reflections carried me, to the time when as a herd boy I tended my mother's cows and those of others in this Salt Lake Valley where many prosperous farms are now located, to my early school days which were sadly limited because of necessity and then my early departure for the Islands of the Sea.