On Thursday morning he was visited by Mr. Morley and two other friends, with whom he conversed.  He also had his Testament, but finding he could not read it, his daughters read to him.  He repeated many hymns, among them the Scotch version of the hundred and third Psalm, but stopped and said, “There is nothing like the original,” which was then read from the Bible.  His mother’s favourite hymn, “Hail, sovereign Light,” was also by his special desire read to him.

Another sleep—­a wandering, perhaps unconscious, look at his children, a struggle, and then a quietness? and the pilgrimage was over, the spirit had fled to be present with the Lord whom he had loved so well and served so faithfully.  “His end was peace.”

He died on the 10th of August, 1883, in his eighty-eighth year.

The funeral took place a few days later at Norwood Cemetery, when, surrounded by such relatives as were in England, Sir Bartle Frere, Mr. Samuel Morley and several other Members of Parliament, deputations from the various Missionary and several Religious Societies, and by the Mayor of Bloemfontein, his remains were consigned to the tomb.

Never had a truer hero been borne to the grave, nor one more thoroughly worthy of the name of MAN.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUSION.

As soon as it was realised that Robert Moffat had actually gone, it was felt that a truly great man had departed from among us.  A niche in the temple of earth’s true nobility seemed empty.  The prevailing feeling was given expression to by some of the leading journals, which in eulogistic articles commented upon the life, work, and character of him who had gone.

The Times, in its review, contained the following remarks:—­“His chief work was among the Bechwanas.  His picture of what they were when he first knew them would hardly now be recognised, so entirely have they changed under the new influences which Moffat was the first to bring to bear upon them.  He found them mere savages, constantly at war among themselves and with their neighbours, ignorant of the arts of agriculture, and in the utterly degraded state for which we must seek a counterpart now in the more distant tribes, whom the message of civilisation has not yet reached.  His first care was to make himself thoroughly master of the language of those to whom he was sent.  For fifty years he has declared he had been accustomed to speak the Bechwana tongue; he reduced it to written characters, and translated the Scriptures into it.  The Bechwanas, under Moffat’s guidance, became new men.  Mission work grew and spread among them; what Moffat had begun to do was taken up by other hands; a permanent body of native pastors was created from among the Bechwanas themselves, and the whole region was raised out of the savage state in which Moffat had found it, and became, in no small degree, civilised as well as Christianised....