‘J.  C. P.’

The Rev. Benjamin Thornton Dudley, for several years a most valuable helper in the work, both at home and abroad, gives the following account of his own share in it, and his recollections of that first year:—­

’The first time I ever saw Mr. Patteson was in the beginning of 1856, when you (this is a letter to Mrs. Selwyn) all visited Lyttelton in the newly arrived “Southern Cross.”  That indescribable charm of manner, calculated at once to take all hearts by storm, was not perhaps as fully developed in him then as afterwards, and my experience was then comparatively limited, yet his words in the sermon he preached on behalf of the Melanesian Mission (a kind of historical review of the growth and spread of the Gospel), although coming after the wonderful sermon of the Bishop in the morning, made a deep impression on several of us, myself among the number.

’You came to Lyttelton at the end of 1856 again, this time without him, and the Bishop brought me up to St. John’s College, and placed me under him there.  I remember at first how puzzled I felt as to what my position was, and what I was expected to do.  Not a single direction was given me by Mr. Patteson, nor did he invite me to take a class in the comparatively small Melanesian school.  Gradually it dawned upon me that I was purposely left there, and that I was expected to offer myself for anything I could do.  When I offered myself I was allowed to assist in this and that, until at length I fell into my regular place.  Although the treatment I received in this respect puzzled me, I felt his great kindness from the first.  How bright he was in those days, and how overflowing with spirits when among the Melanesians.  What fun there used to be of a morning, when he would come and hunt the lazy ones out of bed, drive them down to the bath house, and there assist their ablutions with a few basins of water thrown at them; and what an amount of quiet “chaff” used to go on at breakfast time about it as we sat with them in the great hall, without any of those restraints of the “high table” which were introduced at dinner.

’During the first voyage made that year to return our Melanesian party, I think Mr. Patteson was feeling very much out of sorts.  I do not remember any time during the years in which I was permitted to see so much of him when he took things so easily.  He spoke of himself as lazy, and I confess I used to wonder somewhat how it was that he retired so completely into the cabin, and did apparently so little in the way of study.  He read the “Heir of Redclyffe,” and other books of light reading in that voyage.  I understood better afterwards what, raw youth as I was at the time, puzzled me in one for whom I was already beginning to entertain a feeling different from any previously experienced.  That seems to me now to have been quite a necessary pause in his life after he had with wholeheartedness and full intention given himself to his work, but before he had fully faced all its requirements and had learnt to map out his whole time with separate toil.’