Thus young Taylor preached, unlicensed, for five years. It was the breaking-up and seed-time of New England Methodism. Between the Puritans and Quakers, with their mutual antagonism, the shouting Methodists were as corn between the millstones, a despised and persecuted sect. About the age of twenty-five occurred three notable events in his life. He was licensed by the Methodist Conference to preach. He attended school a short time and began his education. He married one of God’s noble-women to complete his education. For ten years he continued the life of a circuit preacher, growing in culture, power, spirit, and fame, under that wise and gentle nurture. No one can say how far short of its fullness Father Taylor’s life might have fallen without Deborah Taylor. All these seventeen years of his ministry he had, as far as possible, kept near to the coast and the haunts of sailors; praying in the forecastle and preaching on the decks of ships about to sail, wherever he could reach them. The salt air was incense to him, and the music of the surf seemed ever dwelling in the nautilus-chambers of his heart. At last his life-work came in the direction of his longings. At the age of thirty-fire he was called to preach to the sailors of Boston. The meetings were a success from the first, and Mr. Taylor went South and solicited the money ($2,100) to buy a house for their Bethel. (More bread cast on the waters to return after many days to the South.) The work grew, and soon an incorporated society was organized, called the “Boston Port Society;” from the first nondenominational, though a majority of its board were Methodists. The work still grew. Soon the merchants of Boston assumed the burden of the work, and in 1833 “The Seamen’s Bethel” was completed at a cost of $24,000. Soon a Seamen’s Savings Bank and then a Seamen’s Aid Society, a Seamen’s Boarding-house, and then a Mariner’s Home (at a cost of $34,000), an Industrial School for Seamen’s Children, and a Seamen’s Co-operative Store, sprang up around this nucleus. These collateral enterprises were largely the inspiration of Mother Taylor, but the burden of them fell upon the Unitarians of Boston, who soon assumed entire control of the noble charity and mission. Here Father Taylor fulfilled his life-mission. “From 1829 to 1871 he trod this quarter-deck, its master.” The fame of the Bethel and its chaplain, one and the same, went to all quarters of the globe. Edward Everett styled him “The Walking Bethel,” and Richard H. Dana in his “Two Years Before the Mast,” said one of the first inquiries of sailors in foreign ports, from him, was regarding the welfare of Father Taylor, the mariner’s preacher in Boston. A sailor declared he had been in ports where the United States had not been heard of, but never where Father Taylor had not. Once, soliciting aid for Bethel before another audience than his own, he glowingly promised: “Drop your gold into this ocean and