On the return to the Seminary, to enter upon my senior year, the first men I missed were Burner and Tucker, who had graduated the previous summer. Burner wrote me a very interesting letter from the precincts of a prominent New England university to the effect that he was a member of the junior class of that institution, that on Sundays he preached in a very delightful country town; that he was having a rich feast in college fare; the courses in animal psychology, metaphysics, especially in relation to the fundamentals of faith, holding the fullest fascination for him. Tucker, able at last to do a preacher’s work, not only to his own personal taste, but also to the gratification of his parish, was giving himself, sacrificially, to the work of dignifying the life of the people who had called him. He wrote me that he felt his special work in life to have two phases to it: that he should remain unmarried in order that, like a monk, he could do God’s work with singleness of purpose, and that he should go only to struggling, discouraged parishes where the small salaries and the hardships formed a sufficient missionary challenge: parishes in which he should labor until they were transformed and able finally to pay a salary on which a permanent, married man could settle among them and give them the fullest, freest service. “I am setting myself,” concluded Tucker, “to be a mortgage-lifter, parsonage-getter, and salary-raiser for other ministers who are to follow me!” The parish to which I ministered during my last year in the Seminary, and in which I planned to settle immediately upon graduation, was in a seaport town of a quaint type: buried back in the rugged coast lines of the Atlantic. The Embargo Act had been like the chilling breath of petrification on the East Indiamen, the Ceylon traders, the China brigs, and the many other ships which had gone out from its port. The wharves to which of old time these sea-rovers had been tied when in port had rotted until, in my day, the water-front was outlined by their black, damp, soggy ruins. Here and there, outside the precincts of the town, half buried among young saplings and deep grasses, could be seen the piles and planks of a once stout wharf. In the village itself, almost everything pointed, with an index finger, to the past as the scene of the town’s glory. The hotel in which I stayed, in stage-coach days had been a tavern, and from the porch of it the landlord, wearer of a blue military coat with brass buttons, had fed the wild birds and pigeons. The house had an office-boy who was seventy odd years old, a man whose clothes and speech were tinctured with reminiscences of the sea and the past glory of the village. As one tipped back in one of the hundred-year-old chairs, which were whittled, by loungers’ pocket knives, to skeletons of rungs and seats, one saw slow-pacing oxen, nodding their heads in two-four metronomic time, pulling loads