was no rule to indicate what might be reckoned on by others.  His journeys had been made under the worst possible conditions.  Bad food, poor nursing, insufficient medicines, continual drenchings, exhausting heat and toil, and wearing anxiety had caused much of his illness.  He gives a touching detail of the hardships incident to his peculiar case, from which other missionaries would be exempted, but with characteristic manliness he charges the Directors not to publish that part of his letter, lest he should appear to be making too much of his trials.  “Sacrifices” he could never call them, because nothing could be worthy of that name in the service of Him who, though he was rich, for our sakes became poor.  Two or three times every day he had been wet up to the waist in crossing streams and marshy ground.  The rain was so drenching that he had often to put his watch under his arm-pit to keep it dry.  His good ox Sindbad would never let him hold an umbrella.  His bed was on grass, with only a horse-cloth between.  His food often consisted of bird-seed, manioc-roots, and meal.  No wonder if he suffered much.  Others would not have all that to bear.  Moreover, if the fever of the district was severe, it was almost the only disease.  Consumption, scrofula, madness, cholera, cancer, delirium tremens, and certain contagious diseases of which much was heard in civilized countries, were hardly known.  The beauty of some parts of the country could not be surpassed.  Much of it was densely peopled, but in other parts the population was scattered.  Many of the tribes were friendly, and, for reasons of their own, would welcome missionaries.  The Makololo, for example, furnished an inviting field.  The dangers he had encountered arose from the irritating treatment the tribes had received from half-cast traders and slave-dealers, in consequence of which they had imposed certain taxes on travelers, which, sometimes, he and his brother-chartists had refused to pay.  They were mistaken for slave-dealers.  But character was a powerful educator.  A body of missionaries, maintaining everywhere the character of honest, truthful, kind-hearted Christian gentlemen, would scatter such prejudices to the winds.

In instituting a comparison between the direct and indirect results of missions, between conversion-work and the diffusion of better principles, he emphatically assigns the preference to the latter.  Not that he undervalued the conversion of the most abject creature that breathed.  To the man individually his conversion was of over whelming consequence, but with relation to the final harvest, it was more important to sow the seed broadcast over a wide field than to reap a few heads of grain on a single spot.  Concentration was not the true principle of missions.  The Society itself had felt this, in sending Morrison and Milne to be lost among the three hundred millions of China; and the Church of England, in looking to the Antipodes, to Patagonia, to East Africa, with the full knowledge that charity began at home.  Time was more essential than concentration.  Ultimately there would be more conversions, if only the seed were now more widely spread.