BLOWIN' THE GOSPEL TRUMPET.
One hot July day, long ago (in 1839), I was accidentally passing the great Turkish customhouse in Galata, Constantinople, and I found a crowd obstructing the street. Penetrating it I found a poor mortal against the wall, apparently dying in the pains of cholera. His condition was indescribably revolting. I said, “Do you speak English?” “Yes—your eyes,” he replied, turning upon me a look of anguish, or fierce hatred, I hardly knew which. He knew the inhuman crowd was waiting to see him die. “Are you American or English?” “American,” with the same or far worse profanity. I tried to get a couple of porters (homals), usually ready for any such service, to take him and his sack of clothes to a sailors’ boarding house near by. No one would touch him. I offered large pay in vain, when two noble colored sailors, Jamaica negroes, offered to take him without pay. The boarding house rejected us. We went to the English marine hospital, to be rejected in like manner. The two Jamaicans poured out the most awful maledictions upon the English consul, to whom I appealed in vain, and the sick man joined them, until I ordered them to stop, in quick, sharp tones they were accustomed to hear on deck, and not an oath was uttered after that. I then had him carried to the boathouse of Nicola, a good, kind Italian boatman, who had nursed Captain Holt, of Andover, through a long and dangerous illness. He assented to my leaving him in his bunk until I could run and call our doctor, Stamotiodes. The common sailors are generous fellows, faithful to each other unto death. I could not find our doctor, but in the search I most providentially met with Dr. Riach, a Scotch physician of experience in India and Persia. I seized upon him and took him to the boathouse. “Small chance for this poor fellow,” said Dr. Riach, “but administer this prescription; it is all I would do for him to-night.” The druggist first refused to make up the prescription, because “it would kill any man.” But I compelled him to make it up quick, and when I had administered it, I found Dr. Stamotiodes, who took the case in hand with great kindness and attention. One evening he sent word to me to come and bury Brown in the morning; he would not live through the night, and the heat made immediate burial necessary. I went, but the case had turned toward life, and Brown slowly recovered. The Rev. Mr. Hibbard was staying with us, an invalid missionary from Beirut. He visited Brown daily, or if not able to, then Dr. Goodell or myself took his place. He seemed to be truly penitent for all his sinful and abandoned life. He was about twenty-five, had learned to read in his boyhood, but had nearly lost it in his vile, degraded life. Brother Hibbard helped him recover what he had lost, and in two or three weeks he could read a chapter in the New Testament, with some few hitches. When at length, after waiting for weeks, the consul found a passage for him home, he bade me good-by with a sailor’s heart, and said, “I have hitherto done all the evil I could in life, and now I am going to try to do good;” and so Marcus Brown departed, and I did not hope to hear from him again. About a year after Mr. Calhoun, returned missionary, wrote me: “Your sailor holds out a true Christian, and was in Father Taylor’s prayer meeting, and when opportunity for prayer was given, a sailor burst out with: ‘O God, I thank thee for the American missionaries. When I was dying, a poor blasphemous dog, in a street of Constantinople, thou didst send thy servants Hamlin, Hibbard, and Goodell, to save me, soul and body,’ and so on through a unique and earnest prayer, which called forth hearty amens.” Mr. Calhoun failed to find him in the crowd after the meeting, and perhaps another year passed, when I had a very characteristic letter from Brown, not always correctly spelled, but full of life and earnestness. It began, “Dear, dear Mr. Hamlin: Thank God I still survive the ded.” He told of his shipwreck, when he “found his feet standing on the rock Christ Jesus,” “and now I am blowin’ the Gospel trumpet on the Erie Canal.” I went over and read the letter to Father Goodell. He clapped his hands and said, “Let me begin the reply to that letter,” and taking a sheet of paper he wrote: “DEAR MR. BROWN: Blow away, brother, blow.
“Yours in blowin’ the same Gospel trumpet,
“WILLIAM GOODELL.” I know not if he ever received the letter. Twenty-eight years passed away from that contest with death on that hot July day, and, in all the excitement, anxieties, and cares of missionary life, the rescued sailor was forgotten. In 1867 I was dining at the Hotel Newton, Rue de St. Augustine, Paris, at the time of the great Exposition. Near the close of the dinner, at which were seated men and women of different nations and languages, the gentleman sitting at my right turned to me and said:— “I see you are from Constantinople, sir. May I ask if, while there, you chanced to meet with one Cyrus Hamlin,” etc. “I am the person you ask for, sir.” After expressing his surprise and pleasure, he said: “I am just from Honolulu, and I have long wished I could ask you about a sailor, Brown, who has been a sort of sailors’ missionary in the islands, and has done a great deal of good among the seamen of all nations. He has told me how he was dying, a ‘blasphemous dog’ (his own language), in Constantinople, and how you rescued him, and so on and on. Now I want to know how much of this is a sailor’s ‘yarn,’ or is it all true, for he seems to be a man of great simplicity?” “Why! the sailor Brown?” I replied. “I had forgotten him. It is all true, and I bless God that I hear from him again.” The reader will see in this brief story that we can rarely know what good may result from a simple act of kindness, of humanity. Once in a while the good done may become known, but not often. Constantinople, Boston, Erie Canal, Honolulu, and Paris, with twenty-eight years between, do not often come together to reveal what is done. But no good deed is lost. “God will multiply your seed sown, and increase your fruits of righteousness.”—Golden Rule.