’In all the stone buildings, the rough stone is left inside just as it is outside.  It does not look bad at all to my eye, and I doubt if I would have it lined if we had funds to pay for it.

’I hope eventually that stone buildings will take the place of the present wooden schoolroom and dormitories; but this ought to last many years.  Here we live most happily and comfortably.  The climate almost tropical in summer.  The beautiful scenery of the harbour before our eyes, the smooth sea and clean dry beach within a stone’s throw of my window.  The lads and young men have their fishing, bathing, boating, and basking in the sun, which all day from sunrise to sunset beats right upon us; for the west cliff does not project more than a few yards to the north of us, and the eastern boundary is low and some way off.  I see the little schooner at her moorings whenever I look off my book or my paper, and with an opera-glass can see the captain caulking the decks.  All is under my eye; and the lads daily say, “College too cold; Kohimarama very good; all the same Bauro, Mota,” as the speaker belongs to one or other of our fourteen islands represented....  The moment we heard of your gift, we said simultaneously, “Let it be given to this or to some specific and definite object.”  I think you will like to feel not only that the money came most opportunely, but that within the walls built with that money, many many hundreds, I trust, of these Melanesian islanders will be fed and taught, and trained up in the knowledge and fear of God....

’Your affectionate Cousin,

‘J.  C. Patteson.’

Before the old year was out came the tidings of the death of good Miss Neill, the governess whom Patteson had so faithfully loved from early childhood, and whose years of suffering he had done his best to cheer.  ‘At rest at last.’  In the same letter, in answer to some complaint from his sister of want of detail in the reports, he says:  ’Am I trying to make my life commonplace?  Well, really so it is more or less to me.  Things go on in a kind of routine.  Two voyages a year, five months in New Zealand, though certainly two-thirds of my flock fresh every year.  I suppose it still sounds strange to you sometimes, and to others always, but they should try to think for themselves about our circumstances.

’And you know, Fan, I can’t write for the world at large anecdotes of missionary life, and swell the number of the “Gems” and other trashy books.  If people who care to know, would think of what their own intuition tells them of human nature, and history tells them of heathenism, they can make out some notion of real missionary work.

’The school is the real work.  Teaching adults to read a strange tongue is hard work; I have little doubt but that the Bishop is right in saying they must be taught English; but it is so very difficult a language, not spelt a bit as pronounced; and their language is all vocalic and so easy to put into writing.