“Once at Clifton Springs, always there.” That is the proverb. Well, why not? Dr. Cuyler boasts of his thirty years at Saratoga Springs; and he has been a tolerably healthy man, able to do some work in preaching and writing for the newspapers. Multitudes of other people go to the same place year after year for rest and recuperation; and so do many find it to their inclination and profit to come to these springs, season after season. The make-up of Dr. Foster’s Sanitarium develops a peculiar home feeling. The judicious medical treatment, if needed, is an attraction. The water, with, its sulphates of lime and magnesia and soda, has in many cases a remedial quality. I think that within the time I get more of revivification here than I could get anywhere else, and so I am now on my fourth summer at Clifton. Nor can I refrain from saying that I find a peculiar pleasure in coming back to this place, where, during two years of enforced respite from labor, God was preparing my mind for the transition in His life-plan for me, by which I was to be taken from my own dear West and set to doing much the same work at the South, which I have already learned to love. Here I told the Lord that if He would only let me up so that I could again preach the Gospel of His dear Son, I would go anywhere, even to the ends of the earth. But I may as well confess that when He took me at my word and pointed out the field, it did cost a struggle, a night without sleep. Up North to have been a good friend of the slave was one thing; to go down and put one’s self by the side of the depressed ex-bondsman, to take chances with him, to try to lift him up, that was another. Now I bless God for the joy of the work. It is a missionary service without the labor of acquiring and using a strange language. It is in some sense the work of a foreign missionary without going from under the flag of my own country. I feel unworthy of the gratitude of these people, of whom the Master speaks as “these my brethren.” These two years I have gone everywhere from Virginia to Texas, without receiving one word or act of discourtesy, but with many tokens of approbation, from my white fellow-citizens. I find this also a good stand-point from which to look back upon my field, to review the work of the year gone by, to devise for the next, and also to catch the inspiration of Northern interest in this work. Here are Christian and patriotic people from all parts of our country and from all branches of the Church of Christ. A single address before them in the chapel, in behalf of Christian education among the Freedmen, elicits a gratifying expression of sympathy, and imparts an impulse to the cause through several denominational lines.