Chapter 27.
Good-bye to England—A Poem—The Master's Question.
I continued to labor pleasantly with Elder Howard O. Spencer until I was released to return home. I remember the sad look that rested on Howard's face when I said goodbye to him; a man of sorrows, but as true and good a man as ever lived.
I borrowed ten dollars of John H. Miles, and sold him my valise for five dollars. Then I bought a suit of clothes that served me until I returned home.
My last Sunday in England I spent with Elder Jacobs. We attended a Methodist open-air meeting on May Hill. There were four local ministers present. They mistook me for one of Spurgeon's elders from London, and invited me to preach. With joy, I accepted the chair; but soon they ordered me down; and when I refused to come down, they tried to pull me down. I appealed to the people, who sustained me. The ministers left in disgust. I talked for one hour on the restoration of the Gospel, then called President Jacobs to the chair, and he bore a strong testimony to the truth of what I had said.
It was thus that I closed my missionary labors in England.
When I came home, I brought Mother Jaynes, the old lady whom I first saw in a dream, while sleeping in a wooden-bottomed chair. Just before starting for home, I received a kind letter from my father-in-law, William M. Black. Brother Black had forgotten my address, and so sent the letter to the Liverpool office. By mistake it had been sent from there into Scotland. It traveled thence all over Scotland and England, and finally found me on the streets of London. The envelope was so worn that a ten-dollar greenback bill was plainly visible, and was kept in its place only by a tow string tied around the envelope. The money, reaching me in that way seemed a miracle, and I resolved to do a charitable deed with it.
At Michael, Dean Hill, in the Bristol conference, lived a family by the name of Burris. The family consisted of father and mother, a son Absalom, nineteen; Emma, seven; and Kissy, three years of age. The father and son were not in the Church; but the home had been a home for our elders for twenty years. When I was there, the elders had been mobbed so much that open-air meetings had been discontinued.
President Joseph F. Smith wrote me to persist in holding them; but the Saints refused to accompany me, so I went at it alone. Only little Emma Burris went with me, and several times I felt that all that kept the mob from doing violence to me, was the presence of that innocent little girl clinging so trustingly to me, and I loved her for it. I wrote to Mr. Burris, and asked him to let me bring Emma home with me. He consented; and with that ten dollars I emigrated her to Salt Lake City. Upon my arrival at father's, her uncles, Joseph and Thomas Morgan, came to see her. They begged me to let her stav with them. I consented on condition that they would bring the family to Zion. They promised to do so, and they kept their covenant.
Upon reaching Zion, Emma's father and Brother Absalom joined the Church and Brother Burris died a faithful worker in the Logan temple. At this writing, 1916, Appie's son is filling a mission in the southern states. What a rich harvest from so small a sowing! And the end of the fruitage is not yet.