then had to return to meet an engagement.  We went forward climbing the steep hills and finally found that we were standing on the heights above the immense ocean, in the grounds of the Government Reservation.  It was a solemn moment when we for the first time beheld the Pacific, and we were greatly impressed.  There the mighty waters, across which the ships sail to China and Japan and the Sandwich Islands and the Philippine Archipelago and the South Seas, lay before our eyes.  The darkness of the night was coming on, but the sky far off across the waters, away beyond the Farallone Islands, was tinged with red and gold, the fading glories of the dying day.  We could see in the glow of evening the heaving of the sea and the motion of its comparatively calm surface, in that twilight hour.

Gathering clouds hung over the horizon and formed the shadows in the picture.  Every picture has light and shade.  It is a portrait of life.  We stood silently for a time drinking in all the beauty of the scene, well nigh entranced, awed, thrilled betimes; and at last in order to give fitting expression to the thoughts within our hearts, I suggested that we should hold a brief service in recognition of His power who holds the seas in the hollow of His hands, Who had guided our feet in safe paths and byways of the world, often over its troublesome waves.  Ashton said an appropriate Collect from the dear old Prayer Book of so many tender and far off memories, while I expressed my feelings in the grand words of the Psalm—­“Thy way is in the sea, and Thy paths in the great waters, and Thy footsteps are not known.”  We felt God’s presence in that hushed hour, we saw in vision the divine Christ walking over the waters to us!

In our wanderings about the city the sleeping places of the dead naturally attracted our attention; and where, especially, on Sunday afternoons, the living congregate to mourn over their loved ones, to scatter flowers on their graves, or to while away an hour amid scenes which have a melancholy interest and tend to sobriety and remind one of another land where there is no death for those who pass through the Golden Gate of eternity.  Cemeteries have always attracted the living to their solemn precincts at stated times, anniversaries and fiestas.  It is so in all lands, among all peoples no matter what their creed, and in all ages.  Jew and Gentile alike, Mohammedan and Christian, by visiting tomb or grassy mound with some token of their affection, the prayer uttered, the tear shed, the blossoms laid on sacred soil, after this manner cherish the memories of the departed.  And it is well!  Scenes which the traveller may witness in the Campo Santo of Genoa or in the Koimeteria of Athens, on Sundays, in the Mezaristans of Skutari on the Bosphorus and Eyub on the Golden Horn, on Friday afternoons, and in the Kibroth of old Tiberias by the Sea of Galilee or outside of the walls of Jerusalem, on Saturday or in the Cimenterios of Mexico City on fiestas, all testify to the universality of the deep and tender feelings of reverence and affection which animate the human heart and make all men as one in thought and sentiment as they stand on time’s shores and follow the receding forms of their kindred and friends with wishful eyes bedimmed with tears across the Dark River!