’You know the kind of incidents that occur, so I need not repeat them to you.  I have quite learnt to believe that there are no “savages” anywhere, at least among black or coloured people.  I’d like to see anyone call my Bauro boys savages!  Why, the fellows on the reef that have never seen a white man will wade back to the boat and catch one’s arms to prevent one falling into pits among the coral, just like an old nurse looking after her child.  This they did at Santa Maria, where we two swam ashore to a party of forty or fifty men, and where our visit was evidently a very agreeable one on both sides, though we did not know one syllable of the language, and then....  But I almost tremble to think of the immense amount of work opening upon one.  Whither will it lead?  But I seldom find any time for speculations; and oh, my dear tutor, I am as happy as the day is long, though it never seems long to me!....  My dear father writes in great anxiety about the Denison case.  Oh dear! what a cause of thankfulness it is to be out of the din of controversy, and to find hundreds of thousands longing for crumbs which are shaken about so roughly in these angry disputes!  It isn’t High or Low or Broad Church, or any other special name, but the longing desire to forget all distinctions, and to return to a simpler state of things, that seems naturally to result from the very sight of heathen people.  Who thinks of anything but this:  “They have not heard the Name of the Saviour Who died for them,” when he is standing with crowds of naked fellows round him?  I can’t describe the intense happiness of this life.  I suppose trials will come some day, and I almost dread the thought, for I surely shall not be prepared to bear them.  I have no trials at all, even of a small kind, to teach me how to bear up under great ones.’

In truth Coleridge Patteson had entered on the happiest period of his life.  He had found his vocation, and his affections were fastening themselves upon his black flock, so that, without losing a particle of his home love, the yearnings homewards were appeased, and the fully employed time, and sense of success and capability, left no space for the self-contemplation and self-criticism of his earlier life.  He gives amusing sketches of the scenes:—­

’The donkey here, a fatally stubborn brute, is an unceasing amusement to my boys.  No one of them can retain his seat more than ten minutes, but they all fall like cats on their legs amid cries of laughter.  The donkey steers straight for some small scrubby trees, and then kicks and plunges, or else rubs their legs against the sides of the house, and all this time the boys are leaping about the unfortunate fellow who is mounted, and the fun is great.