’Sosaman died at 9 A.M. this day—­a dear lad, one of the Banks Islanders, about ten or twelve years old.  As usual I was kneeling by him, closing his eyes in death.  I can see his poor mother’s face now!  What will she say to me? she who knows not the Christian’s life in death!  Yet to him, the poor unbaptized child, what is it to him?  What a revelation!  Yes, the names he heard at our lips were names of real things and real persons!  There is another world!  There is a God, a Father, a Lord Jesus Christ, a Spirit of holiness, a Love and Glory.  So let us leave him, O Father, in Thy hands, who knowest him who knew not Thee on earth.  Thy mercies never fail.  Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.

’I washed him, and laid him out as usual in a linen sheet.  How white it looked!  So much more simple and touching than the coffin—­the form just discernible as it lay where five had lain before; and then I knelt down in our little chapel; and, I thank God, I could still bless and praise Him in my heart!

’How is it that I don’t pray more?  I pray in one sense less than usual—­am not so long on my knees.  I hope it is that I am so worn out, and so very, very much occupied in tending the sick and dying, but I am not sure.

’Anyhow I am sure that I am learning at terrible cost lessons which, it may be, God would have taught me more gently if I had ears to hear.  I have not in all things depended upon Him, and perpetually sought help from Him.

’Oh that my unworthiness may not hinder His work of mercy!

’If I live, the retrospect of this most solemn time will, I hope, be very useful.  I wonder if I ever went through such acute mental suffering, and yet, mind!  I feel perfectly hardened at times—­quite devoid of sensibility.’

He said in another letter that he felt that if he relaxed his self-command for one moment he should entirely break down.  To him writing to his beloved home was what speaking, nay, almost thinking, would be in another man; it gave an outlet to his feeling, and security of sympathy.  There was something in his spiritual nature that gave him the faculty of realising the Communion of Saints in its fullest sense, both with those on earth and in Paradise; and, above all, with his Heavenly Father, so that he seems as complete an example as ever lived of the reality of that privilege, in which too often we only express our belief.

Sosaman’s was the last death.  On a fragment of pink paper, bearing the date of the next day, it is declared that an alleviation in the worst symptoms had taken place, and that the faces and eyes were less haggard.  ’Oh! if it be God’s will to grant us now a great deliverance, all glory be to Him!’

The deliverance was granted.  The next mail brought tidings of gladness:—­

’St. Andrew’s:  April 17, 1863.

’My dearest Sisters,—­You know the calm yet weary feeling that succeeds to the period of intense anxiety and constant watchfulness.  Six dear children are taken from us, as you know already.  Some twenty-one others have been very ill, nigh unto death.  Two or three are still weak, but doing well.