The Seaboard Parish, Volume 3

The only other part of my history which could contain anything like incident enough to make it interesting in print, is a period I spent in London some few years after the time of which I have now been writing. But I am getting too old to regard the commencement of another history with composure. The labour of thinking into sequences, even the bodily labour of writing, grows more and more severe. I fancy I can think correctly still; but the effort necessary to express myself with corresponding correctness becomes, in prospect, at least, sometimes almost appalling. I must therefore take leave of my patient reader—for surely every one who has followed me through all that I have here written, well deserves the epithet—as if the probability that I shall write no more were a certainty, bidding him farewell with one word: "Friend, hope thou in God," and for a parting gift offering him a new, and, I think, a true rendering of the first verse of the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews:

"Now faith is the essence of hopes, the trying of things unseen."

Good-bye.

THE END