aius, with open doors
and hearts to friends from all lands. He had the merry sportiveness of a
schoolboy, and when our long talks in his study were over, he would
seize his hat and the chain of his pet dog, and cry out: "Come, brother,
come, and let us have a tramp over the Heath." He was a prodigious
pedestrian, and at three score and ten he held his own over a Swiss
glacier, with the members of the Alpine Club. He had hoped to equal his
famous predecessor, Rowland Hill, and preach till he was ninety; but
when he was near his eighty-sixth birthday he was stricken with
paralysis, and never left his bed again. Those last two weeks were spent
in the "Land of Beulah," and in full view of "The Celestial City." When
asked if he suffered pain, he replied: "I have no pain, and nothing to
disturb the solemnity of dying." On the morning of February fourteenth
he passed peacefully over the river, and, as Bunyan said of old
Valiant-for-the-Truth, "The trumpets sounded for him on the other side."
No monarch on his throne is so to be envied as he who now wears that
celestial crown.

Can anything new be said about Charles H. Spurgeon? Perhaps not, and yet
I should be guilty of injustice to myself and to my readers if I failed
to pay my love tribute to the most extraordinary preacher of the pure
Gospel to all Christendom whom England produced in the last century.

I heard him when he was a youth of twenty-two years, in his Park Street
Chapel; I heard him several times when he was at the zenith of his
vigor; I spent many a happy hour with him in his charming home. On my
last visit there I had a "good cry" when I saw his empty chair in its
old place in the study. I did not form any personal acquaintance with
him until the summer of 1872, and it soon ripened into a most warm and
cordial friendship. On each of my visits to London since that time I
have enjoyed an afternoon with him at his home. His first residence was
Helensburg House in Nightingale Road, Clapham, a Southwest District of
London. That beautiful home was his only, luxury; but he spent none of
his ample income on any sort of social enjoyment, and what did not go
for household expenses went for the support of his many religious
enterprises. On my first visit to him he greeted me in his free and
easy, open-handed way. I noticed that he was growing stouter than ever.
"In me," he jocularly said, "that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good
thing," We spent a joyous hour in his well f