sermons, we were interrupted by a messenger from the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who came for about fifty pounds of stories which Doctor Hale had read in order to determine the four winners of prizes.

“I was a little taken in,” he said, with a boyish laugh, after the messenger, stunned dumb by that kindly reception of Doctor Hale’s (which is denied to no one), had departed staggering; “I thought they were to be short stories, and they turned out to be sixty-thousand-word books.”

Doctor Hale’s study, which he calls his office, was once used as the school-room for day scholars, and had a piazza, on one side of it. This Mr. Hale has boarded up and uses the space—three feet wide—for his thousands of pamphlets. I stepped in there while the messenger from the society with the long name was occupying our host’s attention, and, for all the world, it seemed like a touch from Dickens or a section from the Athenæum. That pamphlet alcove, narrow, musty, yet busy, a composite of the stage-coach days and our electric era, gave me a graver suspicion of Doctor Hale’s cosmopolitan interests than any word he had uttered or anything I had hitherto seen in the temple.

When I came back Doctor Hale was again stretched upon the lounge. He began almost fiercely upon his favorite topic, and I can do no better than to give his own words:

“I have written twenty-five books, but I’m not an author; I’m a parish minister. I don’t care a snap for the difference between Balzac and Daudet. That isn’t important in life. I do care about the difference between the classes of men who migrate to this country of mine.”

Here I interrupted him:

“Is it better to do twenty things than one?”

“Not best for every one; but for a man who writes forty sermons a year, it is better not to get into one rut. To write those sermons well he must come 298 into touch with forty things or forty men. As a man of letters, I say the same thing. An author must be an all-around man and take a many-sided view of life. My friends think it harms me. I say it does not.”

Although I was burning to ask a vital and perhaps an impertinent question—for as he was so kind to me I wished not to be intrusive—I waited while he chatted about his connection with Harvard.

It is one of Doctor Hale’s happiest memories that he was an overseer of Harvard University when the modern plan was introduced of having more than one person to take charge of the chapel services. The new custom was initiated by appointing the clerical members of the overseers and faculty to take the chapel in turn. Doctor Hale thinks there were nine of them. So he took a ninth part. That system in turn gave way to the present system, by which five or six men are appointed annually. Each in turn is given a room in college, so as to enter into intimate pastoral relationship with the boys. This system has proved wonderfully successful. In the inauguration of each of its phases Doctor Hale was senior in the board, and heavily influential in the working of the experiment. It is not to be wondered at, that of the experiences of his long life he values making the acquaintance of a “couple of thousand of as fine young men as the day can produce.”

This is only another illustration of Doctor Hale’s wide sweep and influence.

“Doctor Hale, you yourself have hinted at it, namely, that the worst thing your friends say about you is, that you have too many irons in the fire. Do you think that thereby you have missed an opportunity in life?”

“I am glad you asked that question,” he reassured me with his most winning smile. “I don’t think I have,” he said slowly. “I might have written better verses; by the way”—I thought he was changing the subject—“I am just editing a collection of my verses for Roberts Brothers, to be called ‘For Fifty Years.’ On the title-page this quotation from the ‘Ingham 299 Papers’ will be printed as a motto for the poems. Read it aloud to me.”

Judge how I was moved as I read the following words to him:

“Poor Ingham was painfully conscious that he had no peculiar genius for one duty rather than another. If it were his duty to write verses, he wrote verses; to lay telegraph, he laid telegraph; to fight slavers, he fought slavers; to preach sermons, he preached sermons. And he did one of these things with just as much alacrity as the other; the moral purpose entirely controlling such mental aptness or physical habits as he could bring to bear.”

As my voice died away among the volumes, it flashed across me that in these words could be found Doctor Hale’s mental and spiritual biography.

“Is this your epitaph?” I asked, very soberly.

“I am willing to stand by this as my epitaph,” he repeated after me, in his gravest tones.

Now this scene was not an interview, but a revelation, and I felt that it “was good to be there.” But, as an engagement called us to go out together, we arose.

“I wish you could have seen more of my parish work,” he said, as we walked in the rain. He recurred to his favorite topic eagerly. “For that is my real life.”

“Sermons?” The word started him off.

“I have no patience with the idea that it takes six days of grinding to write a sermon. What nonsense! A sermon consists of about two thousand five hundred words. I take a cup of coffee before breakfast and write about six pages—that is, six hundred and fifty words. In the morning I dictate to my amanuensis one thousand five hundred words. I am intensely interested in the subject, and this takes only a quarter of an hour. In the afternoon I look it over and add five or six hundred words, and the sermon is done. In all, I haven’t put my hand for over two hours to paper.”

Although I have written a sermon or two myself, and had a different experience, I did not argue the point. I have a faint suspicion that it would take most people fifty years of experience to arrive at such a wonderful facility.

Power? Where did Doctor Hale get the strength to carry through his hundred duties?—editing—writing—aiding public work and public and private charities—correspondence—for he 300 is the busiest man in Boston, and his business increases upon him week by week in an appalling ratio.

“How on earth do you do it all? Where do you get the power? What is it?”

“The simple truth is,” and I quote his words exactly, “that any child of God, who in any adequate way believes that he can partake of the divine nature, knows that he has strength enough for any business which looks the right way; that is, which helps to bring God’s kingdom into the world. Well, if you are working with Aladdin’s lamp, or with Monte Cristo’s treasures, you are not apt to think you will fail. Far less will you think you will fail if you are working with the omnipotence of the Lord God behind you. When people talk to me, therefore, about optimism or good spirits or expecting success, if I know them well enough I say that I am promised infinite power to work with, and that whenever I have trusted it fairly and squarely, I have found that the promise was true.”

He stopped, and under the shelter of a high steeple we separated: and the parish priest, the author, the eager citizen, the helper of poor girls and