After a rough but safe journey of eight weeks, Robert and Mary Moffat reached Port Elizabeth on the 20th May, 1870, and received a hearty welcome from a large number of missionaries and other Christian friends, who had gathered to meet them.  Making a brief stay they embarked in the mail steamer Roman and landed at Cape Town on the 2nd of June.  Here they were entertained by the Christian community at a public breakfast.  A few days later they embarked in the steamship Norseman, en route for England.

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CHAPTER X.

CLOSING SCENES.

In the Chronicle of the London Missionary Society for March, 1870, the following notice appeared:  “Our readers will be glad to hear that there is now a definite prospect of welcoming again to England our veteran missionary, the Rev. Robert Moffat.  He may be expected, with Mrs. Moffat, about the month of June.  Mr. Moffat no longer enjoys his former robust health.  In his last letter he writes:  ’What to me was formerly a molehill is now a mountain, and we both have for some time past begun to feel some of the labour and sorrow so frequently experienced by those who have passed their three-score years and ten.’”

The Norseman reached Plymouth on the 24th of July, and next day Robert and Mary Moffat landed at Southampton, thus returning to their native land, to leave it no more, after an absence of over fifty years; during which time they had visited it only once before.

On the 1st of August he was welcomed by the Society, at an influential meeting, convened for the purpose, in the Board Room of the Mission House, in Blomfield Street.  At that meeting, alluding to his previous visit in 1839, and to the printing of the New Testament in Sechwana, he stated as follows:—­

“When I came to the Cape, previous to my first visit, I brought a translation of the New Testament, which I had translated under considerable difficulties, being engaged a portion of the day in roofing an immense church, and the remainder in exegetical examinations and consulting concordances.  I was anxious to get it printed, and I brought it down to the Cape, but there I could find no printing-office that would undertake it.  The Committee of the Bible Society very kindly—­as they have always been to me, I say it with pleasure—­forwarded paper and ink to the Cape expecting I should get the work done there.  As I said, there was not a printing-office that would undertake it.  Dining with Sir George Napier, the Governor, I informed him of the difficulty.  He said, ’Jump on board a ship with your translation and get it printed in England, and you will be back again while they are thinking about it here.  Print a New Testament among a set of Dutch printers! why I can’t even get my proclamations printed.’  I said, ’I have become too barbarous; I have almost forgotten my own language; I should be frightened to go there.’  ‘Oh stuff!’ he said.