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Show 176 TALES OF THE COLORADO PIONEERS. the gentlemen above named, but those whom they had sought out and invited to be present and ' take a hand.' It was said that many of them left 'hands' elsewhere to be there. No minister in the land had more reverent attention than had the preacher there that night. He discoursed upon the divine mission of the Christian church, its helpfulness to the lost and despairing, and showed how the church followed men even into these mountains, exhorting and warning them; how the resident pastor had come with a pittance of missionary aid, uncertain of sympathy or support, to be their friend in sickness or in death. He drew a vivid picture of the childhood home and church, the far-away temples in which the fathers and mothers of his hearers were then worshipping, or from which they had been carried to their graves, their end victorious through the same gospel to be preached in this mountain chapel. The congregation dwelt for the time in the associations of the past, by some almost forgotten, and the change was to these feverish spirits as healthful and restful as anything short of a mother's embrace could have been. " Then came the figures representing the balance due on the structure, ' which balance must be provided before the building could be "given to God,'" said the preacher. " Oh, Christian of ' the States,' could you have seen that collection! "There was no handsome usher in kids daintily and deferentially receiving the Master's coin on a silver plate; there was not even a plush-lined box with extended handle; there was no soft sighing by the organ-at a dollar a sigh, but there did happen to be a tin pail in the corner, upon which the eye looking for the silver service fell, |