been paid me.

Our entire party of thirty went out to the gospelship the next morning,
and when the pastor came to meet us, lank and forbidding, his austere
lips vainly trying to curve into a smile of welcome, they introduced me
to him as the minister who was to deliver the sermon. He had just taken
my hand; he dropped it as if it had burned his own. For a moment he had
no words to meet the crisis. Then he stuttered something to the effect
that the situation was impossible that his men would not listen to a
woman, that they would mob her, that it would be blasphemous for a woman
to preach. My associates, who had so light-heartedly let me in for this
unpleasant experience, now realized that they must see me through it.
They persuaded him to allow me to preach the sermon.

With deep reluctance the pastor finally accepted me and the situation;
but when the moment came to introduce me, he devoted most of his time to
heartfelt apologies for my presence. He explained to the sailors that
I was a woman, and fervidly assured them that he himself was not
responsible for my appearance there. With every word he uttered he put a
brick in the wall he was building between me and the crew, until at last
I felt that I could never get past it. I was very unhappy, very lonely,
very homesick; and suddenly the thought came to me that these men,
notwithstanding their sullen eyes and forbidding faces, might be lonely
and homesick, too. I decided to talk to them as a woman and not as a
minister, and I came down from the pulpit and faced them on their own
level, looking them over and mentally selecting the hardest specimens of
the lot as the special objects of my appeal. One old fellow, who
looked like a pirate with his red-rimmed eyes, weather-beaten skin,
and fimbriated face, grinned up at me in such sardonic challenge that I
walked directly in front of him and began to speak. I said:

"My friends, I hope you will forget everything Dr. Blank has just said.
It is true that I am a minister, and that I came here to preach. But now
I do not intend to preach--only to have a friendly talk, on a text which
is not in the Bible. I am very far from home, and I feel as homesick as
some of you men look. So my text is, 'Blessed are the homesick, for they
shall go home.'"

In my summers at Cape Cod I had learned something about sailors. I knew
that in the inprepossessing congregation before me there were many boys
who had run away from home, and men who