After tea, we present the flowers to our guests of honor. By eight o'clock we have eaten, shaken hands, talked informally with every one, and are ready to adjourn to the auditorium. Here we listen to the Chairman's address, and the addresses of five others, including O. A. Carr and G. L. Surber. The congregation sings three hymns, the Singing Class renders another; we have, also, two anthems, and, after the benediction, feel that we have been to a Tea Meeting, indeed.
A few years ago, the Cause in Australia was very weak. Now the pressing need is laborers. The Melbourne Church is strong enough to divide; Surber will preach at the Chapel; a hall will be rented for $400 in gold, in which O. A. Carr will preach; thus forming a nucleus in two remote points in the great city. The speakers at the tea meeting are strong in their faith, and with good reason. Last year the church gave for home and foreign missions, and local expenses, $4000 in gold.
We have never had any trouble with expenses, because each of us does something—each one! that is our secret of success. Far away in Adelaide, Gore and Earl are laboring; here in Melbourne, Carr and Surber—four evangelists for Australia. But, as we shall see, all the preaching is not done by the evangelists. And what of Mrs. Carr? At this very first tea meeting we speak of a school for Sister Carr. "We expect in a few months to see her devoting all her time to the high calling of teaching."
Thus the new work is inaugurated. Not for the writer is the labor of seeking lodgings, or a house which will serve also as a school; not for the reader the weary days of forming an establishment, of settling down to the necessary routine of daily living, of forming grooves in which one may run automatically, the better to give the mind to higher things than food and a roof.
We are in a land where all is strange and new; but when we leave it, all shall have become familiar, and much of it dear. The reader need but glance along the peaks that rise out of the level plain of daily experiences—one tea meeting for him, to fifty for the Carrs; a few characters to be learned from among the thousands who cross the paths of the young missionaries.
One might crowd a large book with the people who come and go, never to return, people important in their own orbits, no doubt, but quite futile to ours. Happy would it be for us and ours, if all the time we scatter among the moving multitudes of life, we might concentrate upon the few who are to abide in our hearts and memory. But that is not to be while life is life; however, it may be reasonably accomplished in book-land.
So, of these hundreds and hundreds of letters before me, whose signatures are but the labels of so many shadows—impersonal spirits who did nothing but write and vanish—we can select only those of a few men who seem to breathe the same air that envelops our principal characters.
Such a breathing reality appears in John Augustus Williams, so real in his profound faith in the dignity of teaching, that the chalk-dust seems to swing above his head as a sort of material halo.
To him we find Mrs. Carr writing: "We reached Melbourne in early September, after a long voyage of 104 days! Contrary winds kept us in the Irish Channel a fortnight; but we kept our spirits up, resolved to be content-subjects of the winds. We drifted within sight of the South American shores. We sailed many miles along the mango and palm-wreathed coast of Brazil. We are well and ready for work. Brother Surber was very happy to see us, and the church gave us a most cordial greeting. I will write brother Joe a description of the voyage; you can exchange letters with him. I enclose a little flower and leaf of woodruff. I plucked it at the foot of the south tower of the royal entrance to Canarvon Castle, on Menia Straits, opposite Anglesey. In that castle, the first prince of Wales was born, April 25, 1284."
T. J. Gore writes to the newcomers from Adelaide, South Australia: "I am aware of your arrival in Melbourne. You do not know how I long to see you both—you come from old Kentucky—may Heaven's richest blessings rest upon that dear state! It is hard to realize that here so near, are two live Kentuckians from my far-away home. You will find conditions and customs very different here from America; but it is the Lord's harvest; moreover, Melbourne contains a great many Americans; here in Adelaide, my eyes are hardly ever blessed by the sight of one, but I console myself with the thought that though I am far from my native land I am still in the Kingdom of the Lord. No doubt you and Surber are now talking over days of long ago, at Kentucky University.