Chapter I: STOCKTON.--Except as, for a short time, more than thirty years

ago, something was done by Rev. S. V. Blakeslee in San Francisco, Stockton was the first point in California occupied by the A. M. A. The work was continued there with scarcely a month's intermission from 1871 till about a year ago, when under financial pressure it was closed for a time. The intention was to resume as soon as the opening of a new fiscal year gave me the right to draw against a new appropriation. Meanwhile it was hoped that a temporary suspension might lead to a greater interest on the part of the Chinese themselves, and that we should begin to get urgent requests from them with pledges of cooeperation such as had sometimes come to us from other places. It was all a mistake for which your Superintendent is chastened, and repents. When we were ready to resume, we found the convenient room which the school had occupied so many years rented for quite other purposes, and no quarters could be obtained except at a rental too exorbitant. Most of those among the pupils who had been specially benefited, and whose urgencies we should otherwise have heard, had moved elsewhere, and the Macedonian cry which we hoped would put us on vantage ground for future operations, did not come to our ears. The Chinese are very numerous in Stockton--at least 1,000 constantly there, and probably 1,000 more who, working here and there in the great San Joaquin Valley, make Stockton their rendezvous. I ought not to have suspended work among them, but rather with faith and courage I should have pressed it with greater zeal, and if hearts seemed harder there than elsewhere, I should have poured in upon them more abundantly the light and love of Christ. All that I could accomplish on this visit was to arrange conditionally for a room in a building not yet completed, and to intensify my own determination somehow to carry to those dark, needy souls "the _fullness_ of the blessing of Christ."