There is no reading less conducive to good spirits than the recitals of missionaries, or than such pitiless records as those compiled by Dr. Thomas William Marshall in his two portly volumes on “Christian Missions.”  The heathen, as portrayed by Dr. Marshall, do not in the least resemble the heathen made familiar to us by the hymns and tracts of our infancy.  So far from calling on us to deliver their land “from error’s chain,” they mete out prompt and cruel death to their deliverers.  So far from thirsting for Gospel truths, they thirst for the blood of the intruders.  This is frankly discouraging, and we could never read so many pages of disagreeable happenings, were it not for the gayety of the letters which Dr. Marshall quotes, and which deal less in heroics than in pleasantries.  Such men as Bishop Berneux, the Abbe Retord, and Father Feron, missionaries in Cochin-China and Corea, all possessed that protective sense of humour which kept up their spirits and their enthusiasms.  Father Feron, for example, hidden away in the “Valley of the Pines,” six hundred miles from safety, writes to his sister in the autumn of 1858:—­

“I am lodged in one of the finest houses in the village, that of the catechist, an opulent man.  It is considered to be worth a pound sterling.  Do not laugh; there are some of the value of eightpence.  My room has a sheet of paper for a door, the rain filters through my grass-covered roof as fast as it falls outside, and two large kettles barely suffice to receive it. ...  The Prophet Elisha, at the house of the Shunamite, had for furniture a bed, a table, a chair, and a candlestick,—­four pieces in all.  No superfluity there.  Now if I search well, I can also find four articles in my room; a wooden candlestick, a trunk, a pair of shoes, and a pipe.  Bed none, chairs none, table none.  Am I, then, richer or poorer than the Prophet?  It is not an easy question to answer, for, granting that his quarters were more comfortable than mine, yet none of the things belonged to him; while in my case, although the candlestick is borrowed from the chapel, and the trunk from Monseigneur Berneux, the shoes (worn only when I say Mass) and the pipe are my very own.”

Surely if one chanced to be the sister of a missionary in Corea, and apprehensive, with good cause, of his personal safety, this is the kind of a letter one would be glad to receive.  The comfort of finding one’s brother disinclined to take what Saint Gregory calls “a sublime tone” would tend—­illogically, I own,—­to ease the burden of anxiety.  Even the remote reader, sick of discouraging details, experiences a renewal of confidence, and all because Father Feron’s good humour is of the common kind which we can best understand, and with which it befits every one of us to meet the vicissitudes of life.