[Illustration:  “I asked him how he lived on the pittance he had received.”]

“It was ten years ago,” went on the Bishop—­“ah, how years fly fast to the old!—­a friend of college days, a bishop in an Eastern State, wrote me a long letter concerning a young convert he had just ordained.  He was a lad of great talents, brilliant and handsome, the son of wealthy parents, who, however, now cast him off, giving him to understand that he would receive nothing from them.  The young man was filled with zeal, and he begged the bishop to give him to some missionary diocese wherein he could work in obscurity for the greater glory of God.  He was so useful and so brilliant a man that the bishop desired to attach him to his own household and was loath to lose him, but the priest begged hard and was persistent; so the bishop asked me to take him for a few years and give him actual contact with the hardships of life in a pioneer state.  Soon, he thought, the young man would be willing to return to his larger field.  The bishop, in other words, wanted to test him.  I sadly needed priests, so when he came with the oil still wet on his hands, I gave him a place—­the worst I had—­I gave him Alta.  Some of you older men know what it was then.  The story of Alta is full of sorrow.  I told it to him, but he thanked me and went to his charge.  I expected to see him within a week, but I did not see him for a year.  Then I sent for him, and with his annual report in my hand I asked him how he lived on the pittance which he had received.  He said that it took very little when one was careful and that he lived well enough—­but his coat was threadbare and his shoes were sadly patched.  There was a brightness in his eyes too, and a flush on his cheek that I did not quite like.  I asked him of his work and he told me that he was hopeful—­told me of the little repairs he had made, of a soul won back, but in the conversation I actually stole the sad tale of his poverty from him.  Yet he made no complaint and went back cheerfully to Alta.

“The next month he came again, but this time he told me of the dire need of aid, not for himself, but for his church.  The people, he said, were poor pioneers, and in the comfortless and ugly old church they were losing their grip on religion.  The young people were falling away very fast.  All around were well ordered and beautiful sectarian churches.  He could see the effect, not visible to less interested eyes but very plain to his.  He feared that another generation would be lost and he asked me if there was any possibility of securing temporary aid such as the sects had for their building work.  I had to tell him that nothing could be done.  I told him of the poverty of my own Diocese, and that, while his was a poor place, there were others approaching it.  In my heart I knew there was something sadly lacking in our national work for the Church, but I could do nothing myself.  He wrote to his own State for help, but the letters were unanswered.