There is an inter blending of human and divine loves; earth and heaven are unitary in companionship and destiny.  The golden ladder rests on the earth and reaches up into the heavens.

About twice a week Ah Lee came to see us at North Beach.  These visits subjected our courtesy and tact to a severe test.  He loved little children, and at each visit he would bring with him a gayly-painted box filled with Chinese sweetmeats.  Such sweetmeats!  They were to strong for the palates of even young Californians.  What cannot be relished and digested by a healthy California boy must be formidable indeed.  Those sweetmeats were—­but I give it up, they were indescribable!  The boxes were pretty, and, after being emptied of their contents, they were kept.

Ah Lee’s joy in his new experience did not abate.  Under the touch of the Holy Spirit, his spiritual nature had suddenly blossomed into tropical luxuriance.  To look at him made me think of the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.  If I had had any lingering doubts of the transforming power of the gospel upon all human hearts, this conversion of Ah Lee would have settled the question forever.  The bitter feeling against the Chinese that just then found expression in California, through so many channels, did not seem to affect him in the least.  He had his Christianity warm from the heart of the Son of God, and no caricature of its features or perversion of its spirit could bewilder him for a moment.  He knew whom he had believed.  None of these things moved him.  O blessed mystery of God’s mercy, that turns the night of heathen darkness into day, and makes the desert soul bloom with the flowers of paradise!  O cross of the Crucified!  Lifted up, it shall draw all men to their Saviour!  And O blind and slow of heart to believe! why could we not discern that this young Chinaman’s conversion was our Lord’s gracious challenge to our faith, and the pledge of success to the Church that will go into all the world with the news of salvation?

Ah Lee has vanished from my observation, but I have a persuasion that is like a burning prophecy that he will be heard from again.  To me he types the blessedness of old China newborn in the life of the Lord, and in his luminous face I read the prophecy of the redemption of the millions who have so long bowed before the Great Red Dragon, but who now wait for the coming of the Deliverer.

The Climate of California.

Had Shakespeare lived in California, he would not have written of the “winter of our discontent,” but would most probably have found in the summer of that then undiscovered country a more fitting symbol of the troublous times referred to; for, with the fogs, winds, and dust, that accompany the summer, or the “dry season,” as it is more appropriately called in California, it is emphatically a season of discontent.  In the mountains of the State only are these conditions not found.  True, you will find dust even there as the natural consequence of