took knowledge of you, that you had been with Jesus.

"The crisis of my life was that dreadful night of the shipwreck. It was
as dreadful as the Day of Judgment. No words of mine can describe to
you what I felt when I knew that our rudder was gone, and saw those
hopeless rocks before us. What I felt for our poor men! But, in the
midst of it all, the words came into my mind, 'And Jesus was in the
hinder part of the ship asleep on a pillow,' and at once I felt He was
there; and when the ship struck I was only conscious of an intense
going out of my soul to Him, like Peter's when he threw himself from
the ship to meet Him in the waters.

"I will not recapitulate what I have already written,--the wonderful
manner in which I was saved, and in which friends and help and
prosperity and worldly success came to me again, after life had seemed
all lost; but now I am ready to return to my country, and I feel as
Jacob did when he said, 'With my staff I passed over this Jordan, and
now I am become two bands.'

"I do not need any arguments now to convince me that the Bible is from
above. There is a great deal in it that I cannot understand, a great
deal that seems to me inexplicable; but all I can say is, that I have
tried its directions, and find that in my case they do work,--that it
is a book that I can live by; and that is enough for me.

"And now, Mary, I am coming home again, quite another man from what I
went out,--with a whole new world of thought and feeling in my heart,
and a new purpose, by which, please God, I mean to shape my life. All
this, under God, I owe to you; and if you will let me devote my whole
life to you, it will be a small return for what you have done for me.