I requested an extension
of my vacation time, in order to carry out a plan to visit the "Old
World." As the trustees of the church considered that the trip might be
of value to the church as well as to myself, I was given "leave of
absence from pastoral duties" for three months' duty from June 18, 1870.
All that I could do had been done in the plans in constructing the new
Tabernacle. I could do nothing by staying at home.

I have crossed the Atlantic so often that the recollections of this
first trip to Europe are, at this writing, merely general. I think the
most terrific impression I received was my first sight of the ocean the
morning after we sailed, the most instructive were the ruins of church
and abbey and palaces. I walked up and down the stairs of Holyrood
Palace, once upon a time considered one of the wonders of the world, and
I marvelled that so little was left of such a wonderful place. Ruins
should be rebuilt.

The most spiritual impression I received was from the music of church
organs in the old world.

I stopped one nightfall at Freyburg, Switzerland, to hear the organ of
world-wide celebrity in that place. I went into the cathedral at
nightfall. All the accessories were favourable. There was only one light
in all the cathedral, and that a faint taper on the altar. I looked up
into the venerable arches and saw the shadows of centuries; and when the
organ awoke the cathedral awoke, and all the arches seemed to lift and
quiver as the music came under them. That instrument did not seem to be
made out of wood and metal, but out of human hearts, so wonderfully did
it pulsate with every emotion; now laughing like a child, now sobbing
like a tempest. At one moment the music would die away until you could
hear the cricket chirp outside the wall, and then it would roll up until
it seemed as if the surge of the sea and the crash of an avalanche had
struck the organ-pipes at the same moment. At one time that night it
seemed as if a squadron of saddened spirits going up from earth had met
a squadron of descending angels whose glory beat back the woe.

In Edinburgh I met Dr. John Brown, author of the celebrated "Rab and his
Friends." That one treatise gave him immortality and fame, and yet he
was taken at his own request to the insane asylum and died insane.

"What are you writing now, Dr. Brown?" I said to him in his study in
Edinburgh.

"Oh, nothing," he replied, "I never could write. I shall never try
agai