One man whom I knew kicked his wife out-of-doors because she objected to having dances in their home. She was his second wife, and was about to become a mother, but died, leaving her little one to the tender mercies of a brutal father. I remember preaching a rather harsh sermon at the funeral; but some years after I found the sermon had a mission. I met the man some hundreds of miles north. When he saw me he said he had never forgotten the sermon, and added, to my surprise, that he was a Christian now, and living with his first wife! How men can lead such lives, involving the misery of others, and often compassing their death, and afterwards live happily, I cannot understand, except for the fact that often for generations these people have been out of the reach of Christian civilization, and so far as morals are concerned have been practically heathen. Yet, after all, I am not sure but that, in the day of judgment, they will be judged less harshly than those who have neglected to send the gospel to them. XV. A TRIP IN NORTHERN MICHIGAN. I had been exploring nearly every part of the Upper Peninsula where there was any chance of an opening for Christian work; had visited thirteen churches, and held meetings with most of them; had a few conversions and two baptisms. I found the villages and towns on the Chicago and North-Western Railway nearly all supplied. There was one place with 1,500 people, and another with 2,000. The former had a Baptist church with about twenty members, and a Methodist Episcopal with about fifteen. The Baptists were building. The rest were more or less Lutheran, Catholic, and Nothingarian. Surely there is need of mission work here, _but_--There are large new-fashioned mills here, with forty years' cutting ahead of them at the rate of fifty million feet of lumber per year. I had excellent audiences here and at Thompson, six miles away, where there was no church. Between these two places is Perryville, with 200 people and no church. Both are lumbering-towns. Another town of importance is Iron Mountain, which then had 2,000 people; two Methodist churches, one Swedish, the other English-speaking. The place was alive with men and full of sin. Where are the right men to send to such places? If one sits in his study and consults statistics, they are plenty; but when you come down to actual facts, they are not to be found. "The Christian League of Connecticut" has much truth in it, but not all the truth. Without doubt their unwise distribution has much to do with "the lack of ministers;" but it is still a lamentable fact that the laborers _are_ few. Not with us alone. The oft-repeated saying that "the Methodist church has a place for every man, and a man for every church," is to be taken with a grain of salt. I meet men every week who tell me they have five, seven, nine, and even eleven charges. We have a thousand just such places.