Such ideas as these of God were held by the heroines of the following stories:—­A little girl, a niece of the beloved Bishop Brooks, had done wrong, and was told to confess her sin to God before she slept, and to beg His forgiveness.  When asked next day whether she had obeyed the command, she said—­“Oh, yes!  I told God all about it, and God said, ‘Don’t mention it, Miss Brooks.’” A similar injunction was laid upon a child brought up by a very severe and rather unjust aunt.  Her reply when asked if she had confessed her sin was “I told God what I had done, and what you thought about it, and I just left it to Him.”  The response of a third American girl (who was somewhat of a “pickle” and had been reared among a number of boys) to the enquiry whether she had asked forgiveness for a wrong done was—­“Oh, yes; I told God exactly what I had done, and He said, ’Great Scot, Elsie Murray, I know 500 little girls worse than you.’” To me this was a much healthier state of mind than setting children weeping for their sins, as I have done myself.

On my second visit to Boston I spent three weeks with the family of William, Lloyd Garrison, son of the famous Abolitionist.  The Chief Justice had given me a letter of introduction to him, and I found him a true-hearted humanitarian, as devoted to the gospel of single tax as his father had been to that of anti-slavery.  They lived in a beautiful house in Brookline, on a terrace built by an enterprising man who had made his money in New South Wales.  Forty-two houses were perfectly and equally warmed by one great furnace, and all the public rooms of the ground floor, dining, and drawing rooms, library, and hall were connected by folding doors, nearly always open, which gave a feeling of space I never experienced elsewhere.  Electric lighting and bells all over the house, hot and cold baths, lifts, the most complete laundry arrangements, and cupboards everywhere ensured the maximum of comfort with the minimum of labour.  But in this house I began to be a little ashamed of being so narrow in my views on the coloured question.  Mr. Garrison, animated with the spirit of the true brotherhood of man, was an advocate of the heathen Chinee, and was continually speaking of the goodness of the negro and coloured and yellow races, and of the injustice and rapacity of the white Caucasians.  I saw the files of his father’s paper, The Liberator, from its beginning in 1831 till its close, when the victory was won in 1865.  Of the time spent in the Lloyd-Garrison household “nothing now is left but a majestic memory,” which has been kept green by the periodical letters received from this noble man up till the time of his death last year.  He showed me the monument erected to the memory of his father in Boston in the town where years before the great abolitionist had been stoned by the mob.  Only recently it rejoiced my heart to know that a memorial to Lloyd Garrison the younger had been unveiled in Boston, his native city; at the same time that a similar honour was paid to his venerated leader, “the prophet of San Francisco.”