’And indeed I feel now with regard to you, my dear Father, that I have not learned to know you better while I was with you than I do now.  I think that in some ways I enter more almost into your mind and thought, or that I fancy I do so:  just as the present possession of anything so often prevents our really taking pains to learn all about it.  We rest content with the superficial knowledge of that which is most easily perceived and recognised in it....

’I think I know from your letters, and from the fact of my absence from you making me think more about you, as much about you as those present.  I very much enjoy a letter from Joan, which gives me a kind of tableau vivant of you all.  That helps me to realize the home life; so do the photographs, they help in the same way.  But your letters, and the fact that I think so much about them, and about you, are my real helps.’

The voyage ended on the 7th of December.  It was the last made under the guidance of the Bishop of New Zealand, and, alas! the last return of the first ‘Southern Cross.’

CHAPTER IX.

Mota and st. Andrew’s college, Kohimarama. 1859-1862.

With the year 1860 a new period, and one far more responsible and eventful, began.  After working for four years under Bishop Selwyn’s superintendence, Coleridge Patteson was gradually passing into a sphere of more independent action; and, though his loyal allegiance to his Primate was even more of the heart than of the letter, his time of training was over; he was left to act more on his own judgment; and things were ripening for his becoming himself a Bishop.  He had nearly completed his thirty-third year, and was in his fullest strength, mental and bodily; and, as has been seen, the idea had already through Bishop Selwyn’s letters become familiar to his family, though he himself had shrunk from entertaining it.

The first great change regarded the locality of the Melanesian school in New Zealand.  Repeated experience had shown that St. John’s College was too bleak for creatures used to basking under a vertical sun, and it had been decided to remove to the sheltered landing-place at Kohimarama, where buildings for the purpose had been commenced so as to be habitable in time for the freight of 1859.

It should be explained, that the current expenses of the Mission had been defrayed by the Eton and Sydney associations, with chance help from persons privately interested, together with a grant of £200, and afterwards £300 per annum from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.  The extra expense of this foundation was opportunely met by a discovery on the part of Sir John Patteson, that his eldest son, living upon the Merton Fellowship, had cost him £200 a year less than his younger son, and therefore that, in his opinion, £800 was due to Coleridge.  Moreover, the earlier voyages, and, in especial the characters of Siapo and Umao, had been so suggestive of incidents fabricated in the ‘Daisy Chain,’ that the proceeds of the book were felt to be the due of the Mission and at this time these had grown to such an amount as to make up the sum needful for erecting such buildings as were immediately requisite for the intended College.