cept the cabins of the few missionaries in the Willamette Valley. This most beautiful and fruitful of lands was waiting God's best planting of a "right seed."

When, on the 15th day of June, 1840, Jason Lee, as superintendent of the mission, announced the name of J. P. Richmond to establish a mission at Nesqually, he named the first American man and family to become a resident north of the Columbia River. In connection with the appointment of Dr. Richmond as missionary, Mr. W. H. Willson was appointed in the secular department and Miss Chloe A. Clark as teacher of the mission school. Before June, 1840, was passed they had made their way from Vancouver down the Columbia and up the Cowlitz River in canoes as far as the Cowlitz could be ascended thus, and then on horses over a rough pack trail to a point within half a mile of the old Hudson's Bay Fort called Nesqually, and about the same distance from the shore of Puget Sound, where they had soon erected a house and established themselves in the work to which they had been appointed. Soon after they were settled in their house, Mr. W. H. Willson and Miss Clark were married by Dr. Richmond; the first couple married in what is now the State of Washington. On the 28th of February, 1842, the first American

child was born to Mr. and Mrs. Richmond, a son, concerning whom the following registry was entered by the father in the family register in the Bible at the time of his baptism:

"Francis Richmond, son of John P. Richmond and his wife, America, was born at Puget Sound, near Nesqually, Oregon Territory, on the 28th of February, Anno Domini 1842, and was baptized by the Rev. Jason Lee, superintendent of the Oregon Missions.

Dr. Richmond was an educated and able man. He graduated as M. D. in Philadelphia about 1830, and afterwards entered the Methodist ministry and was stationed in Jacksonville, Illinois, when he was appointed "Missionary to Oregon." in 1839. He went to Puget Sound, intending to make that region his home for life, but ill health and family circumstances required otherwise, and after four years he found it necessary to return to Illinois. He died in Manitoba a few years ago, over 80 years of age. He antedated all other American settlers north of the Columbia by five years. He, in conjunction with Mr. Willson and Miss Clark, introduced "The New Era" north of the Columbia River.

XII.

NIGHT AND MORNING.

"Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said: The morning cometh, and also the night; if ye will inquire, inquire ye; return, come."

I

-ISAIAH.

N all human history periods of transition from

the old to the new are filled with great conflicts. The old, however bad it was, and however desirable it is to make it give place to the better new, holds with a grasp of fearful tenacity on the power it had, even if it were only to use that power for tyranny and destruction. When did ever barbarism give place to civilization without warfare? When did ever paganism surrender to Christianity until it had made martyrs of Christians? When was ever any part of the earth itself brought out of its age-long conditions of mere savage occupancy, and subdued to the esthetic ideals and needs of cultivated and refined life, unless it breathed out of its own broken breast miasms and deaths into the very nostrils of those who would robe its own deformity and ruggedness with the beauty of culture and the fruitfulness of harvests? The primal divine direction to "cultivate and subdue "the earth

seemed to hint at a struggle to be endured with all the exigencies of defeats and deaths involved in it, before God's ideal for this physical world should be wrought to the perfection of its pattern by the hand of the human artizan. This is well, but, though it may be heroically endured, and bravely carried to its consummation, there is a sadness in martyrdom that awakens the profoundest sympathy of these who gather up the ashes of the martyrs, and weave the laurels of their faint praise above the fragrant urns that bear the precious dust. These principles never found more marked exemplification, or, we may say, more pathetically glorious exemplification, than in the story of the missionary Christianity of the Pacific Coast, of which story Jason Lee is the illuminated center whence the lustre streams over every page.

It will be remembered that in 1839, when Mr. Lee was preparing to return to Oregon with the great reinforcement, he had wedded Miss Lucy Thompson, of Barre, Vermont. She was a lady of rare moral and intellectual endowment, finely educated, and every way qualified to cheer the heart and sustain the hands of the great missionary in his dangerous and self-denying toils. A happier union never made two hearts one. During the two years and a half that she was connected with the mis

sionary family she won by the purity of her life, the intelligence and refinement of her conversation, her sincere and unaffected devotion to the work of the mission, the highest consideration. But suddenly, unexpectedly, on the 20th day of March, 1842, she passed from the "home below to the home in heaven."

Her sickness was brief and not considered danger, though attended with a cough and expectoration. On Saturday, March 20, she coughed. Mr. Lee, who was standing by her side, raised her head upon his arm. One gasp and all was over. A sadder husband, a sadder group, never surrounded a missionary's death bed. When, a few hours later, they laid away her remains by the side of his former companion, they laid away the casket that had borne one of the purest gems that ever blazed on the dark night of Oregon. As Mr. Lee, folding the infant daughter, then but three weeks old, to his heart, turned away from that grave under the oaks of "Lee Mission Cemetery," another golden strand was braided into the chain that would bind his heart forever to the vales and skies of Oregon.

Let us open, now, gently, the door to the inner tabernacle of his heart, for the world and the church, and even Oregon herself has never known this man in the wholeness of his great heart and