’We are sadly in want of men; yet we cannot write to ask persons to come out for this work who may be indisposed, when they arrive in New Zealand, to carry out the particular system on which the Bishop proceeds.  Any man who would come out and consent to spend a summer at the Melanesian school in New Zealand in order to learn his work, and would give up any preconceived notions of his own about the way to conduct missionary work that might militate against the Bishop’s plan—­such a man would be, of course, the very person we want; but we must try to make people understand that half-educated men will not do for this work.  Men sent out as clergymen to the mission-field who would not have been thought fit to receive Holy Orders at home, are not at all the men we want.  It is not at all probable that such men would really understand the natives, love them, and live with them; but they would be great dons, keeping the natives at a distance, assuming that they could have little in common, &c.—­ideas wholly destructive of success in missionary, or in any work.  That pride of race which prompts a white man to regard coloured people as inferior to himself, is strongly ingrained in most men’s minds, and must be wholly eradicated before they will ever win the hearts, and thus the souls of the heathen.

’What a preachment, as usual, about Melanesia!...

’Your loving old Pupil and Nephew,

‘J.  C. Patteson.’

Next follows a retrospective letter:—­

’April 1, 1859:  St. John’s College.

’My dearest Father,—­Thirty-two years old to-day!  Well, it is a solemn thing to think that one has so many days and months and years to account for.  Looking back, I see how fearfully I wasted opportunities which I enjoyed, of which, I fancy, I should now avail myself gladly; but I don’t know that I fancy what is true, for my work now, though there is plenty of it, is desultory, and I dare say hard application, continuously kept up, would be as irksome to me as ever.

’It seems very strange to me that I never found any pleasure in classical studies formerly.  Now, the study of the languages for its own sake even is so attractive to rue that I should enjoy working out the exact and delicate powers of Greek particles, &c.; but I never cared for it till it was too late, and the whole thing was drudgery tn me.  I had no appreciation, again, of Historians, or historians; only thought Thucydides difficult and Herodotus prosy(!!), and Tacitus dull, and Livy apparently easy and really very hard.  So, again, with the poets; and most of all I found no interest (fancy!) in Plato and Aristotle.  They were presented to me as merely school books; not as the great effort of the cultivated heathen mind to solve the riddle of man’s being; and I, in those days, never thought of comparing the heathen and Christian ethics, and the great writers had no charm for me.