country, those toiling sailors were hopeless, loveless, comfortless, joyless, and—­I say it with awe—­heavenless; for scarcely a man of them had knowledge or expectation of a life wherein the miseries of this one may be redressed in some far land where Time is not.”  Then the youngster coldly, gravely told of his surgical work, and it seemed as if he were drawing an inexorable steel edge across the nerves of his terrified hearers.  He watched the impression spread, and then sprang at his peroration with lightning-footed tact.  “We English are like barbarians who have been transferred from a chilly land to a kind of hot-house existence.  We are too secure; no predatory creature can harm us, and we cultivate the lordlier and lazier vices.  Our middle class, as Bismarck says, has ’gone to fat,’ and is too slothful to look for the miseries of others.  The middle-class man, and even the aristocrat, are both too content to think of looking beyond their own horizon.  And yet we are good in essentials, and no tale of pity is unheeded—­if only it be called forth loudly enough.  Let us wake our languid rich folk.  They suffer from a surfeit—­an apoplexy—­of money.  An eager, wakeful, nervous American plutocrat, thinks nothing of giving a large fortune to endow a hospital or an institute for some petty Western town.  Are we meaner or more griping than the Americans?  Never.  Our men only want to know.  Here is a work for you.  I do not call our fishermen stainless; they are rude, they are stormy in passions, they are lacking in self-control; but they are worth helping.  It is not fitting that these lost children of civilization should draw their breath in pain.  Help us to heal their bodies, and maybe you will see a day when their strength will be your succour, and when their rescued souls shall be made in a glory of good deeds and manly righteousness.”  There was no mistake about the effect of this simple speech.  I cannot give the effect of the timbre of Ferrier’s voice, but his virility, his majestic seriousness, just tinctured by acuteness, and his thrill of half-restrained passion, all told heavily.

Slowly the party dispersed to the tents on the lawn, and many were the languidly curious inquiries made about the strange young professor who had turned missionary.  The man himself was captured by Lady Glendower, who explained her woe at the perfidious behaviour of Myung Yang, the most interesting convert ever seen, who was now in penal servitude for exercising his imitative skill on my lady’s signature.  “And I expended a fortune, Mr. Ferrier, on those ungrateful people.  Is it not enough to make one misanthropic?”

“Your ladyship must begin again on a new line.”

“After hearing you, and all about those charmingly horrid accidents, I am almost tempted to take your advice.”

Ferrier was invited to address at least a dozen more drawing-room meetings, and Sir John Rooby grunted, “Young man!  I’m ready to put a set of engines in that boat of Cassall’s, and you can have so much the more money for her maintenance.”