I need not detail the story of my happy Brooklyn pastorate; for that is succinctly given in the closing chapter of this volume. Our home-life here for the past forty-two years has been a record of perpetual providential mercies and unfailing kindness on the part of my parishioners and fellow townsmen. Brooklyn, although removed from New York (for I cannot yet twist my tongue into calling it "Manhattan") by a five minutes' journey on the East River Bridge, is a very different town in its political and social aspects. New York is penned in on a narrow island, and ground is worth more than gold. It is therefore piled up with very fine apartment houses for the rich, or tenement houses for the poor to more stories than the ancient buildings on the Canongate of Edinburgh. Here in Brooklyn we have all Long Island to spread over, and land is within the reach of even a parson's purse. A man never feels so rich as when he owns a bit of real estate, and I take some satisfaction in the bit of land in the front of my domicile, and in the rear, capable of holding several fruit trees and rose-beds. Oxford Street has the deep shade of a New England village. We come to know our neighbors here, which is a degree of knowledge not often attained in New York or London. The social life here is also less artificial than at the other end of the bridge. There is less of the foreign element, and of either great wealth or poverty; we have neither the splendor of Paris, nor the squalor of the by-streets of Naples. The name of "Breucklen" was given to our town by its original Dutch settlers, but the aggressive New Englanders pushed in and it is a more thoroughly Yankee city to-day than any city in the land outside of New England. My old friend, Mayor Low, urged the consolidation of Brooklyn with New York on the ground that its moral and civic influence would be a wholesome counteraction of Tammany and the tenement-house politics. For self-protection, I joined with my lamented brother, the late Dr. Storrs, in an effort to maintain our independence. Ours is pre-eminently a city of homes where the bulk of the people live in an undivided dwelling, and I do not believe that there is another city either in America, or elsewhere, that contains over a million inhabitants, so large a proportion of whom are in a school house during the week, and in God's house on the Sabbath. [Illustration: THE LAFAYETTE AVENUE CHURCH.] One of the glories of Brooklyn is its vast and picturesque "Prospect Park," with natural forests, hills and dales and its superb outlook over the bay and ocean.