conceive him by examples nearer home; we may all have known some divine of the old school in Scotland, a literal Sabbatarian, a stickler for the letter of the law, who was yet in private modest, innocent, genial and mirthful.  Much such a man, it seems, was Father Dordillon.  And his popularity bore a test yet stronger.  He had the name, and probably deserved it, of a shrewd man in business and one that made the mission pay.  Nothing so much stirs up resentment as the inmixture in commerce of religious bodies; but even rival traders spoke well of Monseigneur.

His character is best portrayed in the story of the days of his decline.  A time came when, from the failure of sight, he must desist from his literary labours:  his Marquesan hymns, grammars, and dictionaries; his scientific papers, lives of saints, and devotional poetry.  He cast about for a new interest:  pitched on gardening, and was to be seen all day, with spade and water-pot, in his childlike eagerness, actually running between the borders.  Another step of decay, and he must leave his garden also.  Instantly a new occupation was devised, and he sat in the mission cutting paper flowers and wreaths.  His diocese was not great enough for his activity; the churches of the Marquesas were papered with his handiwork, and still he must be making more.  ‘Ah,’ said he, smiling, ’when I am dead what a fine time you will have clearing out my trash!’ He had been dead about six months; but I was pleased to see some of his trophies still exposed, and looked upon them with a smile:  the tribute (if I have read his cheerful character aright) which he would have preferred to any useless tears.  Disease continued progressively to disable him; he who had clambered so stalwartly over the rude rocks of the Marquesas, bringing peace to warfaring clans, was for some time carried in a chair between the mission and the church, and at last confined to bed, impotent with dropsy, and tormented with bed-sores and sciatica.  Here he lay two months without complaint; and on the 11th January 1888, in the seventy-ninth year of his life, and the thirty-fourth of his labours in the Marquesas, passed away.

Those who have a taste for hearing missions, Protestant or Catholic, decried, must seek their pleasure elsewhere than in my pages.  Whether Catholic or Protestant, with all their gross blots, with all their deficiency of candour, of humour, and of common sense, the missionaries are the best and the most useful whites in the Pacific.  This is a subject which will follow us throughout; but there is one part of it that may conveniently be treated here.  The married and the celibate missionary, each has his particular advantage and defect.  The married missionary, taking him at the best, may offer to the native what he is much in want of—­a higher picture of domestic life; but the woman at his elbow tends to keep him in touch with Europe and out of touch with Polynesia, and to perpetuate, and