I wish I had the space to describe some of the foregatherings that I have had with my twin brother in the Gospel.  We visited Italy together, preached to “the Saints that are in Rome,” and went down into that room in the sub-basement of St. Clement’s where Paul is believed to have held meetings with them that were of Caesar’s household.  We roamed out on the Appian Road, over which the great Apostle entered the Eternal City.  So conscientious was my brother Hall in his teetotalism that though tired and thirsty, he never would touch the weak, common wine of the country, lest his example might be plead in favor of the drinking usages.  We once went up to Olney and sat in Cowper’s summer house, and entered John Newton’s church, and the old sexton told Dr. Hall that he had been converted by “Come to Jesus.”  We went together to Stonehenge, and as we passed over Salisbury Plain we recalled Hannah Moore’s famous shepherd who said:  “The weather to-morrow will be what suits me, for what suits God, suits me always.”  We spent a very delightful couple of days in rowing down the romantic river Wye, stopping for lunch at Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.  In his home he was a hospitable Gaius, 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