These weekly journeys began when I arose on Saturday morning at five o’clock, drank a hastily prepared cup of cocoa, and hurried off to the station for the six o’clock train. Then the train would start on its way through the snowdrifts, puffing and gasping down white aisles through rows of stiff, stately pines whose hands held puffy clouds of snow, and then followed a slow passage through miles of birches bending low under the weight of wet snow like robed saints humbled by too great a weight of glory. The railway trip was followed by a steamer journey of eight miles through a heavy, sad sea which never seemed to have any light in it, and in whose icy surface pretty grey and mottled gulls were not afraid to dip their palpitating breasts. The steamer put me ashore on an island whose centre was loaded with a serried row of little mountains. At the landing I found a stage and drove for eight miles over the island to my parish. The stage horse rushed us down dipping roads that threaded between precipitous mountain sides, whose summits were desert rocks and at whose feet had crumbled cliff after cliff of red rock, spread out like a rusty iron yard. Then the road became a climb until some highlands were attained and we sped through a little fishing village which nestled close to a mysterious, secluded cove, guarded by stern, fretted cliffs, a place where Stevenson would have had a cave of smugglers or the anchorage of a rakish pirate craft. Then came a turn in the road, where, behind a fringe of thick, old gold birches and in the midst of some dead oak stumps, nature had placed a cathedral pile of gigantic slabs of stone, one on another, as if to show to man what the angels of strength could do once they started to build with stone. Next followed a bewildering ride over a spiral road up a steep hill on which stood aristocratic summer homes. At a lookout where the road took a sudden dip, one saw the cold ocean far down below with its heavy, listless breakers pounding wearily against the iron cliffs, as if saying, “Why do the poets insist on our ceaselessly trying to shatter this cliff? I wish they would let us rest through the winter, till the summer visitors come: then I will pound like Vulcan’s hammer to please them!” In the distance, little dismal islands stood in the sea like burnt dumplings in gravy. Over them the gulls were screaming and wailing, adding to the solitude and the winter’s dreariness. Then the stage slanted down the hill and after a long, twisting ride drew up before the village post-office, where I met my host and was duly welcomed as the new minister. Back and forth, week after week, returning to the Seminary on Monday evenings, I accomplished my journeys faithfully. Each week besides my studies I had to plan for the church. There was little time for idleness, for the hours of recreation were taken up in travel. On these trips I took a book and tried to have it read on my return.