’I am writing now because I am tired with this cold, but chiefly because when I write only for the mail I send you such wretched scrawls, just business letters, or growls about something or other which I magnify into a grievance.  But really, dear Joan and Fan, I do like much writing to you; only it is so very seldom I can do so, without leaving undone some regular part of the day’s work.  I am quite aware that you want to know more details about my daily life, and I really wish to supply them; but then I am so weary when I get a chance of writing, that I let my mind drift away with my pen, instead of making some effort to write thoughtfully.  How many things I should like to talk about, and which I ought to write about:  Bishops Mackenzie and Colenso, the true view of what heathenism is, Church government, the real way to hope to get at the mass of heathens at home, the need of a different education in some respects for the clergy, &c.  But I have already by the time I begin to write taken too much out of myself in other ways to grapple with such subjects, and so I merely spin out a yarn about my own special difficulties and anxieties.

’Don’t mind my grumbling.  I think that it is very ungrateful of me to do so, when, this year especially, I am receiving such blessings; it is partly because I am very much occupied, working at high pressure, partly because I do not check my foolish notions, and let matters worry me.  I don’t justify it a bit; nor must you suppose that because I am very busy just now, I am really the worse for it.  The change to sea life will set me all to rights again; and I feel that much work must be done in a little time, and a wise man would take much more pains than I do to keep himself in a state fit to do it.

’I have told you about our manner of life here.  Up at 5, when I go round and pull the blankets, not without many a joke, off the sleeping boys, many of the party are already up and washing.  Then, just before prayers, I go into the kitchen and see that all is ready for breakfast.  Prayers at 5.45 in English, Mota, Baura, &c., beginning with a Mota Hymn, and ending with the Lord’s Prayer in English.  Breakfast immediately after:  at our table Mr. Pritt, Mr. Kerr, and young Atkin who has just joined us.  At the teachers’ table, five Norfolk Islanders, Edward (a Maori), five girls and two of their husbands, and the three girls being placed at this table because they are girls; Melanesians at the other three tables indiscriminately.  There are four windows, one at the north, three at the east side.  The school and chapel, in one long modern building, form the corresponding wing on the eastern side of my little room, and the boys dormitories between.

’We are daily expecting the vessel, though it will be a quick passage for her if she comes in the next ten days, and then what a bustle!

’We send Dudley and his wife away to Canterbury for eight or nine months; he is so weak as to make the change, which I had urged him to try for some time past, quite necessary.