a month. We took possession of our apartments
an hour after we had engaged them, and had nothing to do but order our
dinner and walk out; and all this for less, I think, than it would have
cost us to live at a good boarding-house in Broadway.

We visited various parts of England,--Warwick, Kenilworth, Oxford,
Birmingham, and Liverpool, and made acquaintance with persons whom to
know was worth going far, and whom [102] to remember has been a constant
pleasure ever since.

Well, we came back in August, 1843, in the steamer "Hibernia." What
a joy to return home! We landed in Boston. The railroad across
Massachusetts had been completed during our absence, and brought us
to Sheffield in six or seven hours; it had always been a weary journey
before, of three days by coach, or a week with our own horse. A few
days' rest, and then six or eight hours more took us to New York, where
we found the water fountains opened; the Croton had been brought in that
summer. Did it not seem all very fit and festal to us? For we had come
home!

My health, however, was only partially reestablished, and the recruiting
which had got me for constant service in my church but three years more.
The winter of 1846-47 I passed in Washington, serving the little church
there. En the spring I returned to New York, struggled on with my duties
in the church for another year; in the spring of 1848 sold my house, and
retired to the Sheffield home, continuing to preach occasionally in New
York for a number of months longer, when, early in 1849, my connection
with the Church of the Messiah was finally dissolved. I would willingly
have remained with it on condition of discharging a partial service,
with a colleague to assist me: it was the only chance I saw [103] of
continuing in my profession. The congregation, at my instance, had
sought for a colleague, both during my absence in Europe and in the
later years of my continuance with it, but had failed,--there appearing
to be some singular reluctance in our young preachers to enter into
that relation,--and there seemed nothing for the church to do but to
inaugurate a new ministration.

It was in this crisis of my worldly affairs, so trying to a clergyman
who is dependent on his salary, that I experienced the benefit of a rule
that early in life I prescribed to myself; and that was, always to lay
up for a future day some portion of my annual income. I insisted upon it
that, with as much foresight as the ant o