The following Sunday Mr. A. and family all filed into their pew, serene and happy in the thought that they had avoided the old missionary. As the organ was playing the voluntary, the pastor entered the pulpit from the vestry and a stranger with him. The pastor took the opening exercises and the second hymn was sung, when the pastor rose and said that Mr.----, the missionary, as announced last Sunday, would now address them. Mr. A. was thunderstruck. He did not like to go out in the middle of a service, and so determined to sit it through. The missionary told his simple tale. The plates came in. The collection was unprecedentedly large. Mr. A.’s plethoric pocket-book had disgorged itself upon the plates, and no heartier worker for foreign missions is now found in that church. Mr. A. had tried his best to keep his ear from being twisted. Now it needs no twisting. He has learned to go and loves to go. There was a church in our fold at home whose pastor was determined that it should not be wound up for foreign missions. He had succeeded, as he himself told me, in keeping all missionaries and secretaries and agents out of his pulpit during all the years of his pastorate. When the day came for collections for any of our Boards the fact was stated, the plates were passed, and those gave who wished. The collection, as a matter of course, under such a chill, was a minimum. It required some of the very best and most wary and skillful manœuvring to get hold of the ear of that church; but it was obtained and twisted, and off it started on the trot in the missionary work, and since then it has annually held down its ear and begged to have it twisted, as it wanted to go more. Scores of incidents which occurred in my own experiences among the churches in America, and which recalled my “horse winding,” come crowding into my mind, but I forbear. For I remember the phalanx of noble churches that needed no such winding up, who were all alive and always on the alert; who gave regularly, generously, nobly; who, from the pastor, the head, to the humblest member, prayed from the lips, from the heart, _from the pocket_, “Thy Kingdom come.” They are always glad to get hold of the recruiting watchman, and ask him, “Watchman, what of the night?” but they never have to be wound up to start them giving. God give us more and more of such churches and more such Christians and church members, so that no missionary or secretary need come to _beg_, but can come with radiant countenance and say, “Brethren, with the funds you are continually sending us for the work, we have done for the Master thus and thus.” Then in looking over our churches and our benevolent work we shall no longer have occasion to remember “the horse that had to be wound up.” REV. JACOB CHAMBERLAIN, D.D. Mudnapilly, India, April 30, 1879. * * * * * ITEMS FROM THE FIELD.