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time to save John’s life.
    I well remember how she held his feet up in the air and how the water flowed from his mouth. I admit it was a somewhat primitive method of resuscitation, but it was mother’s method, and it proved to be successful. Nearly drowned at two and a half!
     
    SAVED FROM DROWNING AT TWENTY-SIX YEARS OF AGE
    Twenty-four years later, we were working together in special mission work as “The Harper Brothers.” The day was very fine. We were some miles from Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, England, on the coast. Without considering the possibility of a strong receding tide, we entered the water to bathe. I could swim but a very little. John could not swim one stroke. We were soon in difficulty. But for that Providence which rules all, my brother’s life-story might have ended in the sea, and mine too on that occasion. When once we got safely out of danger, we felt sure—exhausted though we were—that our Heavenly Father had mercifully saved us, and together we praised Him.
     
    SAVED FROM DROWNING AT THIRTY-TWO YEARS OF AGE
    Six years after this, John went on a trip to Palestine with a friend, Mr. Wylie of Glasgow. They were on board a ship on the Mediterranean, and it sprang a leak. After hours of weary suspense, most of which time they were staring death in the face, they were rescued. My brother, in a lecture afterwards, graphically described this incident. He said, “The fear of death did not for one moment disturb me. I believed that sudden death would be sudden glory, but there was a wee, motherless girl in Glasgow, and oh, I thought, if I had only committed her to my dear brother George’s care before I left.” Needless to say, his brother would unhesitatingly have accepted the trust, whether committed to him or not, a trust he would have considered sacred. Thus, on three occasions to my knowledge, prior to the final one of the fifteenth of April 1912, my brother was face-to-face with a grave in the waters.
     
    A LABORIOUS STUDENT
    Our parents were humble people. My father had a drapery business in the village of Houston, which did not yield a very large income, but notwithstanding the problem of bringing up a family of six children, he strove to give us all the best possible education. My father was himself a man of fair education and was widely read. However, John was not mindful in those days and missed much that would have proved helpful to him in after years, as he often admitted. I think the marvel is that he developed so strikingly. Again and again his diction in address and in letter-writing was, to me, simply charming. But, from his later teens onward, he was a laborious student. Few men prepare themselves and their message for the pulpit as he did. This, perhaps, is at least one explanation of my brother’s development.
     
    STANDING UP FOR JOHN
    I well remember our schoolmaster calling John out for punishment. It may have been because of his badly-prepared lessons. I rather think it was. However, the cane was being used somewhat freely and severely. I sat for a short time, but then my stronger self asserted itself. In those days, as in all the intervening years, my brother was the apple of my eye. Accordingly, I felt within myself that “this will not do.” Lessons or no lessons, this man will not beat my brother after such a fashion. I rose with my slate in my hand, raising it above my head and declaring at the same moment, “If you don’t stop flogging my brother, I’ll do for you.” The schoolmaster stopped at once and came right up to me, and before the whole school, he praised me for thus standing up for John. Ah! Don’t you see? John was my brother!
    School days were all too soon over, and as stated by others, John went early to work. It was not considered wrong in those days in the country to send a boy to work at the age of fourteen or fifteen. He was supposed to have got a fair education and to have got some bone. For five years or more, he followed various