took his place for two years, and he arranged for an exchange of three weeks with Miss Turner.  She is the first woman I ever heard in the pulpit.  I was thrilled by her exquisite voice, by her earnestness, and by her reverence.  I felt as I had never felt before that if women are excluded from the Christian pulpit you shut out more than half of the devoutness that is in the world.  Reading George Eliot’s description of Dinah Morris preaching Methodisim on the green at Hayslope had prepared me in a measure, but when I heard a highly educated and exceptionally able woman conducting the services all through, and especially reading the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments with so much intelligence that they seemed to take on new meaning, I felt how much the world had been losing for so many centuries.  She twice exchanged with Adelaide—­the second time when Mr. Woods had returned—­and it was the beginning to me of a close friendship.

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest flattery; and when a similar opportunity was offered to me during an illness of Mr. Woods, when no layman was available, I was first asked to read a sermon of Martineau’s and then I suggested that I might give something of my own.  My first original sermon was on “Enoch and Columbus,” and my second on “Content, discontent, and uncontent.”  I suppose I have preached more than a hundred times, in my life, mostly in the Wakefield Street pulpit; but in Melbourne and Sydney I am always asked for help; and when I went to America in 1893-4 I was offered seven pulpits—­one in Toronto, Canada, and six in the United States.  The preparation of my sermons—­for, after the first one I delivered, they were always original—­has always been a joy and delight to me, for I prefer that my subjects as well as their treatment shall be as humanly helpful as it is possible to make them.  In Sydney particularly I have preached to fine audiences.  On one occasion I remember preaching in a large hall, as the Unitarian Church could not have held the congregation.  It was during the campaign that Mrs. Young and I conducted in Sydney—­in 1900, and we had spent the day—­a delightful one—­with the present Sir George and Lady Reid at their beautiful home at Strathfield, and returned in time to take the evening service at Sydney.  I spoke on the advantages of international peace, and illustrated my discourse with arguments, drawn from the South African War, which was then in progress.  I seized the opportunity afforded me of speaking some plain home truths on the matter.  I was afterwards referred to by The Sydney Bulletin as “the gallant little old lady who had more moral courage in her little finger than all the Sydney ministers had in their combined anatomies.”  For one of my sermons I wrote an original parable which pleased my friends so much that I include it in the account of my life’s work.  “And it came to pass after the five days of Creation which were periods of unknown length of time that God took