whom I could get up no interest.  I am not defending these idiosyncrasies as if they were all right, but stating what I felt and what I feel.  I am indeed very happy here; I trust not less useful in my way.  School of course flourishes.  You would be surprised at the subjects that I and my first class work at.  No lack of brains!  Perhaps I can express it briefly by saying that I have felt for a year or more the need of giving them the Gospel of St. John.  Because they were ready, thank God, for those marvellous discourses and arguments in that blessed Gospel, following upon the record of miracles wrought or events that happened.

’Of course the knowledge of the facts must come first, but there was always in school with me—­either they have it as a natural gift, or my teaching takes naturally that line—­a tendency to go deeper than the mere apprehension of a fact, a miracle wrought, or a statement made.  The moral meaning of the miracle, the principle involved in the less important expression of it, or particular manifestation of it, these points always of late I am able to talk about as to intelligent and interested listeners.  I have these last six weeks been translating St. John; it is nearly done.  Think, Fan, of reading, as I did last night, to a class of fifteen Melanesian Christians, the very words of St. John vi. for the first time in their ears!  They had heard me paraphrase much of it at different times.  I don’t notice these things, unless (as now) I chance to write about them.  After 6 P.M.  Chapel, I remain with some of the lads, the first class of boys, men, and women, every night, and in addition, the second class every other night (not on the nights when I have had them from 7 to 8).  I used to catechise them at first, starting the subject myself.  Now, I rejoice to say, half goes very quickly in answering questions, of which they bring me plenty.

Then, at about 8.50 or 9, I leave them alone in the Chapel (which opens, as you know, into my sitting-room), and there they stay till past 10, talking over points among themselves, often two or three coming in to me, “Bishop, we can’t quite make out this.”  What do they know and ask?  Well, take such a subject as the second Psalm, and they will answer you, if you ask them, about prophecy and the prophetic state.  Test them as to the idea they form of a spiritual vision of something seen, but not with the fleshly eye, and they will say, “Yes, our minds have that power of seeing things.  I speak of Mota, it is far off, but as I speak of it, I see my father and my mother and the whole place.  My mind has travelled to it in an instant.  I am there.  Yes, I see.  So David, so Moses, so St. Peter on the housetop, so St. Paul, caught up into the third heaven, so with his mind.”

’"But was it like one of our dreams?”

’"Yes and No—­Yes, because they were hardly like waking-men.  No, because it was a real true vision which God made them see.”