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Speaking of himself in one of his discourses while on the island, he said, 'I do not want to be buried in the ground when I die. But bury me, rather, in the deep blue sea, where the coral rocks shall be my pillow, and the seaweeds shall be my winding-sheet, and where the waves of the ocean shall sing my requiem for ever and ever.''

This last remark was given somewhat differently on another occasion, and was done into verse by Charles M. F. Deems, and published in "The Christian Advocate." This is the new version in prose and poetry:

"When I die, I wish you to take me to my own pure salt sea and bury me; where I have bespoken the seaweed for my winding-sheet, the coral for my coffin, and the sea-shells for my tombstone." -REV. E. T. TAYLOR.

"The seaweed shall be my winding-sheet,

And the coral shall be my coffin meet,
The beautiful shells shall my form secrete;
And the swelling surge,

As it dashes proudly to the shore,

With the solemn music of its roar,

On the wings of the whistling wind shall pour

My wild, sad dirge."

For four years longer he continued in these journeyings, often by the deep sea, only once getting away from the music of its roar, when he was sent to Milford and Hopkinton. At last, in 1828, while preaching at Fall River, his time came. The Boston Methodists had a chapel left vacant by the erection of a new church, and they desired that it should be appro

priated to the sailors. That desire was fostered by the thought that so fit a man to instruct them and lead them in the way that they should go was wandering along the shore, his talents half used, and his great ability half squandered. The man and the mission met, and Father Taylor took up his abode in Boston.

VII.

THE BETHEL ENTERPRISE.

Finds his Place. -His Wife's Story of their Coming to Boston. -Rev. George 8. Noyes's Narrative of the Origin and Growth of the Port Society. Its Bethel.Store. Aid Society to Seamen's Families.-Mariner's House.Its Chief Helpers, Messrs. Motley, Barrett, and Fearing. Mr. Holbrook's Narrative of the Beginning of the Movement. - First Sermon in the First Bethel. The Methodists originate the Enterprise. - The Unitarians accept it, and carry it forward. - The New Church.-Its Dedication. - Out at Sea.

ATHER TAYLOR had been a member of the

FAT

Church seventeen years, a licensed preacher thirteen, and a travelling preacher nine years before he reached the real beginning of his life-work and renown. He was in the juicy prime of his manhood, not far from thirty-five years old, when he leaped upon the quarter deck, where he held such sway for nearly half a century. He had begun in this line and had steadily and unconsciously pursued it. His conversion was in a tarpaulin hat and sailor's jacket; his first sermons were to sailors; his prayers and preaching were full of the salt, salt sea; his circuits had hugged the beach. They had only once got so far inland that he could not in an hour

"Travel thither,

And see the children play upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

From Scituate round about to Newport he had illumined the South Shore, the Cape, the Vineyard, and the Narraganset with his tongue of fire. His only two preaching places north of Boston when he began to teach and to preach were by the shore of the sounding sea, Saugus and Marblehead. There was a fascination in it to him, and in him to it, which seemed to be mutually irresistible. Nay, there was a divinity that shaped this end. The doom of his life was on one line from the start. The runaway lad from a Virginia plantation took the strange freak for a Southern lad of going to sea, with an unconscious drawing of Providence. As Farragut left the hills of Tennessee, and struggled through the Naval Academy in order that he might become the naval deliverer of his country; so Edward Thomson Taylor went forth, not knowing whither or wherefore he went. "The child was father of the man," in conduct no less than in character. And in his happy case he found

"His days to be,

Joined each to each in natural piety."

How this last and permanent manner of his life began to be, may be best told in the words of his wife. In her journal she relates, not only the reasons for his coming, but her own conversion to the seamen, and an interesting incident which inaugurated his Port career. It was almost as important an event in the history of the Bethel for " Mother Taylor" to get her heart turned to the work, as it was for Father Taylor

to be appointed unto it. Thus she records the facts in her journal, written in the year 1868, just on the close of her long and loving life:

-

"In the year 1828 we were stationed in Fall River. This was our second year. In October the Methodists in Boston sent for Mr. faylor to preach to the seamen in a vacated church, the first one built by the Methodists, as an experiment. The house was filled to overflowing and the result was the moving of our family from Fall River to Boston in 1829. Mr. Taylor was in his element. Having been a sailor himself, his heart yearned for the conversion of his brethren of the sea; and his soul was cheered in seeing them come home to God. The Methodists did not feel able or sufliciently interested to sustain an institution for seamen. The house was to be sold; and Mr. Taylor went South and begged the money with which the house was purchased, thus establishing preaching for seamen. When we first came to Boston, I did not worship constantly at the Bethel, but joined the Bennet-street Methodist Church, where I continued to worship for some three or four years, laboring with and for others, not my husband's people. I felt the need of sympathy, which I thought I could not have with them.

"About this time I had a very bad cough, grew very feeble, and it was thought I should live but a short time. During this season of illness, I decided, that, if I recovered, I would devote myself to my husband's people, doing as I had done before coming to Boston, consider them our people, and get my good in trying to do good among them. A circumstance transpired when Mr. Taylor first came to Boston worthy of note. A dissipated man, an infidel, despising religion and every thing good, dreamed that a stranger was coming to Boston, and he must go and hear him preach. The good Spirit followed him; he went to church; and when he saw the preacher he exclaimed, "That is the man I saw in my dream.' Before the sermon closed, he came forward to the altar, begging to be prayed for and with. This was the first fruit of Mr. Taylor's labors in Boston. God gave him this soul.

"He was naturally a great man, was talented and of good education, but was very uninviting in personal appearance, almost to loathsomeness, from his long-continued dissipation. Yet, as he grew into the new life, his flesh became like the flesh of a babe; and after twenty years, as I looked for the last time upon his body sleeping in death, I praised God for such a trophy of divine grace.