’I don’t think, however, that your words will come true of my appearing in shovel hat, &c., at Heath’s Court some fine day.  It is very improbable that I shall ever see the northern hemisphere, unless I see it in the longitude of New Guinea.

’I must try to send a few island shells to M——­, B——­, and Co.; those little ones must not grow up, and I am sure that you all do not suffer them to grow up, without knowing something about “old cousin Coley” tumbling about in a little ship (albeit at present in a war steamer) at the other end of the world.  Seriously, dear Uncle, as they grow older, it may be some help for them to hear of these poor Melanesians, and of our personal intercourse with them, so to speak.

’I have but little hope of hearing, if I return safe to New Zealand at the end of November, that this disastrous war is over.  I fear that the original error has been overlaid by more recent events, forgotten amongst them.  The Maori must suffer, the country must suffer.  Confession of a fault in an individual is wrong in a State; indeed, the rights of the case are, and perhaps must be, unknown to people at a distance.  We have no difficulty here in exposing the fallacies and duplicities of the authors of the war, but we can’t expect (and I see that it must be so) people in England to understand the many details.  To begin with, a man must know, and that well, Maori customs, their national feeling, &c.  It is all known to One above, and that is our only hope now.  May He grant us peace and wisdom for the time to come!

’I have been reading Helps again this voyage, a worthy book, and specially interesting to me.  How much there is I shall be glad to read about.  What an age it is!  America, how is that to end?  India, China, Japan, Africa!  I have Jowett’s books and “Essays and Reviews.”  How much I should like to talk with you and John, in an evening at Heath’s Court, about all that such books reveal of Intellectualism at home.  One does feel that there is conventionalism and unreality in the hereditary passive acceptance of much that people think they believe.  But how on Jowett’s system can we have positive teaching at all?  Can the thing denoted by “entering into the mind of Christ or St. Paul” be substituted for teaching the Catechism?

’Not so, writes my dear Father in the depth of his humility and simplicity, writing to me what a father could scarcely say to a son!  But our peculiar circumstances have brought this blessing to me, that I think he has often so “reamed out” his heart to me in the warmth of his love to a son he was never again to see in the body, that I know him better even than I should have done had I remained at home.

’So wonderful was my dearest Father’s calmness when he wrote on the 24th of April, that if he was alive to write again in May, I think it not impossible that he may allude to these matters.  If so, what golden words to be treasured up by me!  I have all his letters.  You will see, or have seen him laid by my dear Mother’s side.  They dwell together now with Him in Paradise.