WHILE Mrs. Worth and Sallie were still in the North, the Rev. John Durham received a unanimous call to the pastorate of one of the most powerful Baptist churches in Boston, with a salary of five thousand dollars a year. He was receiving a salary of nine hundred dollars at Hambright, which could boast at most a population of two thousand. He declined the call by return mail.

The committee were thunderstruck at this quick adverse decision, refused to consider it final, and wrote him a long urgent letter of protest against such ill-considered treatment. They urged that he must come to Boston, and preach one Sunday, at least, in answer to their generous offer, before rendering a final decision. He consented to do so, and went to Boston. He sought Sallie the day after his arrival.

“Ah, my beautiful daughter of the South, it’s good to see you shining here in the midst of the splendours of the Hub, the fairest of them all!” he said shaking her hand feelingly.

“You mean pining, not shining,” she protested.

“That’s better still. I knew your heart was in the right place!”

“How is he, Doctor?” she asked.

“He’s trying to pull himself together with his work, and succeeding. The shock of a great sorrow has steadied his nerves, broadened his sympathies, and it will make him a man.”

A look of longing came over her face. “I don’t want him to be too strong without me,” she faltered.

“Never fear. He’s so despondent at times I have to try to laugh him out of countenance.”

She smiled and pressed his hand for answer as he rose to go.

“How do you like these Yankees, Miss Sallie?”

“I’ve been surprised and charmed beyond measure with everything I’ve seen!”

“You don’t say so! How?”

“Well, I thought they were cold-blooded and inhospitable. I never made a more foolish mistake. I have never been more at home, or been treated more graciously in the South. To tell you the truth, they seem like our most cultured people at home, warm-hearted, cordial, sensible and neighbourly. Mama is so pleased she’s trying to claim kin with the Puritans, through her Scotch Covenanter ancestry.”

“After all, I believe you are right. I never preached in my life to so sensitive an audience. There’s an atmosphere of solid comfort, good sense, and intelligence that holds me in a spell here. This is the place in which I’ve dreamed I’d like to live and work.”

“Then you will accept, Doctor?”

“Now listen to you, child! Don’t you think I’ve a heart too? My brain and body longs for such a home, but my heart’s down South with mine own people who love and need me.”

The committee did their best to bring the Preacher to a favourable decision at once, but he smiled a firm refusal. They refused to report it to the church, and sent Deacon Crane, now a venerable man of seventy-six, the warmest admirer of the Preacher among them all to Hambright. They authorised him to make an amazing offer of salary, if that would be any inducement, and they felt sure it would.

When the Deacon reached Hambright and saw its poverty and general air of unimportance he felt encouraged.

“A man of such power stay a lifetime in this little hole! Impossible!” he exclaimed under his breath, when he looked out of the bus along the wide deserted looking streets with a straggling cottage here and there on either side.

He stopped at the same hotel with the Preacher and became his shadow for a week. He was seated with him under the oak in the square, threshing over his argument for the hundredth time, in the most good-natured, but everlastingly persistent way.

“Doctor, it’s perfect nonsense for a man of your magnificent talents, of your culture and power over an audience, to think of living always in a little village like this!”

“No, deacon, my work is here for the South.”

“But, my dear man, in Boston, it would be for the whole nation, North and South. I ’ll tell you what we will do. Say you will come, and we will make your salary eight thousand a year. That’s the largest salary ever offered a Baptist preacher in America. You will pack our church with people, give us new life, and we can afford it. You will be a power in Boston, and a power in the world.”

The Preacher smiled and was silent. At length he said, “I appreciate your offer, deacon. You pay me the highest compliment you know how to express. But you prosperous Yankees can’t get into your heads the idea that there are many things which money can’t measure.”

“But we know a good thing when we see it, and we go for it!” interrupted the deacon.

“Believe me,” continued the Preacher, “I appreciate the sacrifice, the generosity, and breadth of sympathy this offer shows in your hearts. But it is not for me. My work is here. I don’t mind confessing to you that you have vastly pleased me with that offer. I ’ll brag about it to myself the rest of my life.”

“But Doctor, think how much greater power a generous salary will give you in furnishing your equipment for work, and in ministering to any cause you may have at heart,” pleaded the deacon.

“I don’t know. I have a salary of nine hundred dollars. With five hundred I buy books,—food, clothes, shelter, the companionship for the soul. The balance suffices for the body. I haven’t time to bother with money. The man who receives a big salary must live up to its social obligations, and he must pay for it with his life.”

“Doctor, there must be some tremendous force that holds you to such a decision in a village. It seems to me you are throwing your life away.”

“There is a tremendous force, deacon. It is the overwhelming sense of obligation I feel to my own people who have suffered so much, and are still in the grip of poverty, and threatened with greater trials. I can’t leave my own people while they are struggling yet with this unsolved Negro problem. Two great questions shadow the future of the American people, the conflict between Labor and Capital, and the conflict between the African and the Anglo-Saxon race. The greatest, most dangerous, and most hopeless of these, is the latter. My place is here.”

The deacon laughed. “You’re a crank on that subject. Come to Boston and you will see with a better perspective that the question is settling itself. In fact the war absolutely settled it.”

“Deacon,” said the Preacher with a quizzical expression about his eyes, “Do you believe in the doctrine of Election?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I thought so. You know, I never saw a man who believed in the doctrine of Election who didn’t believe he was elected. I never saw a man in my life, except a lying politician, who declared the Negro problem was settled, unless he had removed his family to a place of fancied safety where he would never come in contact with it. And they all believe that the Negro’s place is in the South.”

The deacon laughed good-naturedly.

“Come with us, and we will show you greater problems. For one, the life and death struggle of Christianity itself with ............