a thirty-two years' ministry in All Souls Church, Chicago, which
I organized and in which I continue to work. For the last eight years I
have been head resident of the Abraham Lincoln Centre, which I founded
and which I still direct. For thirty-two years I have been Editor of
_Unity_, a weekly independent religious magazine, devoted to "Freedom,
Fellowship, and Character in Religion."

In 1890 I secured possession of a tract of land which was once the site
of the prosperous early Wisconsin village of Helena, on the banks of the
Wisconsin River in Iowa County, where in 1863 ex-Governor C. C. Washburn
and C. C. Woodman, two young men, founded a shot-making manufactory. The
old shot tower gave name to the summer encampment known as Tower Hill,
where, in connection with the little farm adjoining, I have found
vacation rest and renewal for the last twenty years.

Two graves have touched me with peculiar tenderness, and suggest the
unwritten and too often cruelly-neglected pathos in the life of the
immigrant pioneer, much of which I have seen, a part of which I have
been. A little sister, two years my senior, a fair blossom, wilted on
the journey and the little body was left in a roadside grave in Utica,
New York. I was too young to remember her, but through all the
succeeding years that unmarked and unvisited grave has left a hallowed
touch of tenderness in the home, and given to the missing one a potency
perhaps greater than abides with the unburied that remain.

Scarce a year had elapsed after the arrival in the "big woods" when the
fatherly uncle, the bachelor-partner whose name I bear, fell before the
relentless attack of fever--so easily controlled now, but so fatal then.
He died in a saw-mill at Oconomowoc, and the first grave in the
settlement was hollowed by the hands of his brother at the foot of a
great tree in the deep forest. The father and brother, who was "priest
unto his own household," read and prayed and woke the forest echoes with
his own voice, as he sang a sustaining old Welsh hymn. Perhaps this
devout tradition lying back of my memory has had much to do with what
faithfulness may have characterized the services of the private whose
Diary is here recorded, and the ministry whose career was bargained for,
to a degree that cannot be estimated in the sombre forest and the tented
field.

Perhaps another word may be pardoned. On the way to Camp Randall, the
tears which had scarcely dried from the heart-brea