their work will be the training of young natives to be themselves teachers, and, I pray God, missionaries in due time.  I am so glad that you quite feel my wants, and sympathise with me.  It is difficult to give reasons—­intelligible to you all at a distance—­for everything that I may say and do, because the circumstances of this Mission are so very peculiar.  But you know that I have always the Primate to consult with as to principles; and I must, for want of a better course, judge for myself as to the mode of working them out in detail.

’Two plans are open for obtaining a supply of young men.  First, I may receive some few ready-trained men, who nevertheless will have to learn the particular lessons that only can be taught here on the spot.  Secondly, I may have youths of (say) sixteen to eighteen years of age, sent out from such a school as Stephen Hawtrey’s for example, who will come with a good general knowledge of ordinary things, and receive a special training from myself.  I think, too, that New Zealand will now and then supply an earnest, active-minded young fellow—­who will be a Greek or Latin scholar, yet may find a useful niche in which he may be placed.  At present I have means only to maintain one or two such persons, and this because I am able to use the money my dear Father left me for this purpose.  Indeed, I have no other use for it.  The money received on public account would not keep the Mission in its present state, and the expenditure ought to be increased by maintaining more scholars and teachers.  I don’t forget what you say about the philological part of my business.  My difficulty is this, mainly:  that it is next to impossible to secure a few hours of continuous leisure.  You can have no idea of the amount of detail that I must attend to:  seeing everything almost, and having moreover not a few New Zealand matters to employ my time, besides my Melanesian work.  I have, I suppose, a considerable amount of knowledge of Melanesian tongues, unknown by name to anyone else perhaps; I quite feel that this ought not to die with me, if anything should suddenly happen to me.  I hoped this summer to put together something; but now there is this Maori war, and an utterly unsettled state of things.  I may have to leave New Zealand with my Melanesians almost any day.  But I will do what I can, and as soon as I can.  Again:  I find it so hard to put on paper what I know.  I could talk to a philologist, and I fancy that I could tell him much that would interest him; but I never wrote anything beyond a report in my life, and it is labour and grief to me to write them—­I can’t get on as a scribe at all.  Then, for two or three years I have not been able to visit some islands whose language I know just enough of to see that they supply a valuable link in the great Polynesian chain.  One might almost get together all the disjecta membra and reconstruct the original Polynesian tongue.  But chiefly, of course, my