order was made in view of the high appreciation of your valuable service in this parish since the time when you entered on your duties here. The seven years would have been completed had you remained with us until the 1st of next September.

"It gives me great pleasure to inform you of this action on the part of the Vestry, to assure you of the general esteem and regard in which you are held in this Parish and to add to these expressions my own best wishes and the testimony to my entire confidence in you as a faithful priest and a man without reproach among us in the order of your life.

"Believe me to remain,

"Very truly and faithfully yours,
"MORGAN DIX.

"The Rev. A. S. Crapsey."

T

CHAPTER XXI

BEGINNINGS ARE HARD

HE despondency of which I have just made note was owing to that sad faculty of the genus homo which permits him to see before and after, so that his days are days of anticipation and days of regret; he thinks of what he has had, of what he will have, but seldom of what he has.

When we came to Rochester we were full of what we had had, the busy days, the interesting people, the personal consideration that was the harvest of our past and we had reaped it. We did not think that with the seed of that past we were to sow our present and in due time reap our future.

When we were preparing to remove from New York to Rochester, I had in view the welcome which awaited our arrival. I had a vision of the people crowding to see and hear the distinguished man who had condescended to undertake the task of enlightening the dark places of the little city of Rochester, bringing to it the wisdom which he had acquired in the largest parish of the largest city in America. I was cast down when I saw my little chapel with only twoscore sheep to wait on the ministration of the newly arrived shepherd. But I did my best.

Following upon the stir of our life in New York, our new life was as a graveyard to a ballroom; we were literally buried alive. Our nearest neighbours were Roman Catholics; Mr. Maloney was to the front of us; Mr. Daugherty was to the rear of us; Mr. Kehoe was to the

right of us; these good souls who belonged to the True Church; Saint Mary's or Saint Boniface's, with their congregations thronging by the thousands to the mass every Sunday morning, looked upon us and our little handful of people with compassion. As neighbours they gave us a kindly welcome. They expected for us the fate of our predecessors: Mr. Flack had gone, Mr. Bonar had gone and we, too, would go.

When my wife came to her new home, she was crushed by its utter loneliness. The church was on a side street where the passage of a wagon was an event; there was no coming and going. Our ten families were busy; the men with their work in the shops, the women with their household duties. These people had no time for sociability, nor were they greatly interested in their church; in fact, they did not think of it as their church; it was Mr. Douglas' church; he had built it; he supported it; he appointed and dismissed the ministers. This attitude of the people was the attitude of the church at large and of the city. The rector of St. Andrew's is in a trap and let him get out of it if he can.

But the day brought its duties. The children must be cared for; breakfast, dinner and supper must be prepared and eaten; tables laid and cleared away; beds made; rooms set in order; the few people in the parish must be visited; the sermon made ready for the coming Sunday; the mere routine of life saved us from the utter loss of our courage. Day followed day, each bringing its changes. Little by little the people of the neighbourhood came to know that the rectory doors were open to any need of body or soul. Our warden, Mr. Douglas, attentive to our comfort, had us to dinner now and then. I fell back on my habit of reading to while away the time. Strangers from various parts of the city would drop into our chapel of a Sunday morning, and they who came once were apt to come again,

until at last the room was well filled and on high days and holidays it was overcrowded.

Before the first year had passed, all thought of loneliness was lost in the stimulating stir of our new work. My wife and I soon recognized that this loneliness had been our salvation. If we had entered at once the social life of the city, going here and there and everywhere, we should never have entered into the lives of our people and made ourselves their servants as we were compelled to do in order to escape from the loneliness of our own situation. The slow but constant increase of the attendance upon the Sunday morning worship at St. Andrew's Chapel demanded additional accommodation. It was distressing for men and women to come from various parts of the city and find no welcome in this House of God.

To remedy this state of affairs, in the spring and summer of 1880 Mr. Douglas caused the completion of the church by the building of the nave, aisles and tower. The nave was some eighty feet long; the choir and chancel were thirty feet, making the length of the church, as a whole, one hundred and ten feet. The chapel, extending westward from the choir and chancel, was about sixty feet in length. The rectory adjoining the chapel was a little more than fifty feet in width, facing Ashland Street. This group of buildings when completed were not only commodious, but of singular beauty. The architect was the younger Upjohn, who, following the lines of his father, the elder Upjohn, architect of Trinity Church, New York, revived the Gothic form of architecture in this country. It is true that St. Andrew's Church was not pure Gothic as the clerestory was wanting, but this omission did not mar the general effect of the structure. When, as soon happened, my wife had laid out the grounds in front of the rectory and to the side of the church, planting a hedgerow between the street and the rectory grounds, placing

flowering shrubs along the side of the church with a white spruce in the centre of the lawn and the green sward all around, one could travel far and not find a lovelier sight; it was very English. Standing at gaze, one might imagine oneself in Surrey and think of English parsons and squires, ladies of quality and dames of high degree.

As soon as this building was completed, it was consecrated by the bishop and we emptied our congregation of sixty into this church which would hold five hundred, but what of that? If forty could become sixty, could not sixty become five hundred? Which it did in the course of three years, not that we had a congregation of five hundred every Sunday, but we had need of an auditorium accommodating this number, and more, on high days, holidays and to welcome the Bishop.

As the years went on, the work of St. Andrew's parish increased, of which a full description will follow this chapter, until the sometime lonely corner of Ashland Street and Averill Avenue became one of the liveliest corners in the city. It did not quite come up to State and Main Streets in its activity, but there was no outlying corner that could rival it. We had our parish house, now our schoolhouse, on Hickory Street; we built a new parish house on Averill Avenue opposite the church.