During my absence our Sunday services were conducted by the most talented preachers we could secure.  With the exception of a few days’ influenza while I was in Paris, in January, just prior to my return, the trip was a glorious success.  According to the editorial opinion of one newspaper I had “discovered a new Adam that was to prove a puissant ally in his future struggles with the old Adam.”  This was not meant to be friendly, but I prefer to believe that it was so after all.  In England I was promised, if I would take up a month’s preaching tour there, that the English people would subscribe five thousand pounds to the new Tabernacle.  These and other invitations were tempting, but I could not alter my itinerary.

While in England I received an invitation from Mr. Gladstone to visit him at Hawarden.  He wired me, “pray come to Hawarden to-morrow,” and on January 24, 1890, I paid my visit.  I was staying at the Grand Hotel in London when the telegram was handed to me.  With the rest of the world, at that time, I regarded Mr. Gladstone as the most wonderful man of the century.

He came into the room at Hawarden where I was waiting for him, an alert, eager, kindly man.  He was not the grand old man in spirit, whatever he may have been in age.  He was lithe of body, his step was elastic.  He held out both his hands in a cordial welcome.  He spoke first of the wide publication of my sermons in England, and questioned me about them.  In a few minutes he proposed a walk, and calling his dog we started out for what was in fact a run over his estate.  Gladstone was the only man I ever met who walked fast enough for me.  Over the hills, through his magnificent park, everywhere he pointed out the stumps of trees which he had cut down.  Once a guest of his, an English lord, had died emulating Gladstone’s strenuous custom.  He showed me the place.

“No man who has heart disease ought to use the axe,” he said; “that very stump is the place where my friend used it, and died.”

He rallied the American tendency to exaggerate things in a story he told with great glee, about a fabulous tree in California, where two men cutting at it on opposite sides for many days were entirely oblivious of each other’s presence.  Each one believed himself to be a lone woodsman in the forest until, after a long time, they met with surprise at the heart of the tree.  American stories seemed to tickle him immensely.  He told another kindred one of a fish in American lakes, so large that when it was taken out of the water the lake was perceptibly lowered.  He grew buoyant, breezy, fanciful in the brisk winter air.  Like his dog, he was tingling with life.  He liked to throw sticks for him, to see him jump and run.

“Look at that dog’s eyes, isn’t he a fine fellow?” he kept asking.  His knowledge of the trees on his estate was historical.  He knew their lineage and characteristics from the date of their sapling age, four or five hundred years before.  The old and decrepit aristocrats of his forest were tenderly bandaged, their arms in splints.