’September 16th.—­Off the Santa Cruz group, some twenty miles distant.  To-morrow, being Sunday, we stay quietly some way off the islands; and on Monday (D.V.) we go to Nukapu, and perhaps to Piteni too, wind permitting.  You can enter into my thoughts, how I pray God that if it be His will, and if it be the appointed time, He may enable us in His own way to begin some little work among these very wild but vigorous energetic islanders.  I am fully alive to the probability that some outrage has been committed here by one or more vessels.  The master of the vessel that Atkin saw did not deny his intention of taking away from these or from any other islands any men or boys he could induce to come on board.  I am quite aware that we may be exposed to considerable risk on this account.  I trust that all may be well; that if it be His will that any trouble should come upon us, dear Joseph Atkin, his father and mother’s only son, may be spared.  But I don’t think there is very much cause for fear; first, because at these small reef islands they know me pretty well, though they don’t understand as yet our object in coming to them, and they may very easily connect us white people with the other white people who have been ill-using them; second, last year I was on shore at Nukapu and Piteni for some time, and I can talk somewhat with the people; third, I think that if any violence has been used to the natives of the north face of the large island, Santa Cruz, I shall hear of it from these inhabitants of the small islets to the north, Nukapu, and Piteni, and so be forewarned.

’If any violence has been used, it will make it impossible for us to go thither now.  It would simply be provoking retaliation.  One must say, as Newman of the New Dogma, that the progress of truth and religion is delayed, no one can say how long.  It is very sad.  But the Evil One everywhere and always stirs up opposition and hindrance to every attempt to do good.  And we are not so sorely tried in this way as many others.’

Contrary winds—­or rather a calm, with such light wind as there was, contrary—­kept the vessel from approaching the island for four days more, while the volcano made every night brilliant, and the untiring pen ran on with affectionate responses to all that the last home packet had contained, and then proceeded to public interests:—­

’Then the great matters you write about—­the great social and religious crisis in England now.  Moreover, who can estimate the effect of this German and French war upon the social state of Europe?  Possibly a temporary violent suppression in North Germany of Republican principles, a reaction, an attempt to use the neutrality of England as a focus for political agitation.  And then the extravagant luxury side by side with degrading poverty!  It is a sad picture; and you who have to contemplate it have many trials and troubles that are in one sense far away from me.