One was the Reverend Hilary Vireo, minister of Mavis Place Chapel, Boston,--coming back to his work in glorious renewal from his eight weeks' holiday in Europe. The other was Christopher Kirkbright, younger partner of the house of Ferguson, Ramsay, and Kirkbright, tea and silk merchants, Hong Kong. Christopher Kirkbright had gone out to China from Glasgow, at the age of twenty-one, pledged to a ten years' stay. For five years past, he had had a share in the business for himself; for the two last, he had represented also the interest of Grahame Kirkbright, his uncle, third partner; had inherited, besides, half of his estate; the other half had come to our friend at home, his sister, Miss Euphrasia. "I had no right to stay out there any longer, making my tools; multiplying them, without definite purpose. It was time to put them to their use; and I have come home to find it. A man may take till thirty-one to get ready, mayn't he, Mr. Vireo?" "The man who took up the work of the world's salvation, began to be about thirty years of age when he came forth to public ministry," returned Mr. Vireo. "I never thought of that before. I wonder I never did. It has come home to me, in many other parts of that Life, how full it is of scarcely recognized analogy to prevailing human experience. That 'driving into the Wilderness!' What an inevitable interval it is between the realizing of a special power and the finding out of its special purpose! I am in the Wilderness,--or was,--Vireo; but I knew my way lay through it. I have been pausing--thinking--striving to know. The temptations may not have been wanting, altogether, either. There are so many things one can do easily; considering one's self, largely, in the plan. My whole life has waited, in some chief respects, till the end of these ten pledged years. What was I to do with it? Where was I to look for, and find most speedily, all that a man begins to feel the desire to establish for himself at thirty years old? Home, society, sphere; I can tell you it is a strange feeling to take one's fortune in one's hand and come forth from such a business exile, and choose where one will make the first link,--decide the first condition, which may draw after all the rest. Happily, I had my sister to come home to; and I had the remembrance of the little story my mother told me--about my name. I think she looked forward for the boy who could know so little then of the destiny partly laid out for him already." "About your name?" reminded Mr. Vireo. He always liked to hear the whole of a thing; especially a thing that touched and influenced spiritually.