information about Melanesia may be interesting.  I have begun by getting together numerals in forty quite unknown dialects.  I will give, at all events, short skeleton grammars too of some.  But we have no time.  Why, I have from five hundred to two thousand or more carefully ascertained words in each of several dialects, and of course these ought to be in the hands of you all at home.  I know that, and have known it for years; but how to do it, without neglecting the daily necessary work?

’Again:  the real genius of the language, whatever it may be, is learned when I can write down what I overhear boys saying when they are talking with perfect freedom, and therefore idiomatically, about sharks, cocoa-nuts, yams, &c.  All translations must fail to represent a language adequately, and most of all the translation into a heathen language of religious expressions.  They have not the ideas, and the language cannot be fairly seen in the early attempts to make it do an unaccustomed work.

’I remember more of you and my Aunt than you suppose.  Even without the photograph (which I am very glad to have—­thank you for it), I could have found you and Aunt out in a crowd.  I can’t say that I remember my own generation so well.

’Thank you again for writing so kindly.

’Always, my dear Cousin,

’Affectionately yours,

‘J.  C. Patteson, Missionary Bishop.’

The next mail carried the reply to Johanna’s sympathy with the troubles of the time of sickness in the early part of the year.

’August 28, 1863.

’My dear Joan,—­Very full of comfort to have all your kind loving thoughts and words about our sickness.  I know you thought and talked much about it, and indeed it was a very heavy visitation viewed in one way, though in another (and I really can’t analyze the reason why) there was not only peace and calmness, but eyen happiness.  I suppose one may be quite sure one is receiving mercies, and be thankful for them, although one is all the time like a man in a dream.  I can hardly think of it all as real.  But I am sure that God was very, very merciful to us.  There was no difficulty anywhere about the making known the death of the lads to their relatives.  I did not quite like the manner of the people at Guadalcanar, from which island poor Porasi came; and I could not get at the exact place from which Taman came, though I landed on the same island north and south of the beach from which I brought him.

’I do not at all think that any interruption of the work has been occasioned by it.  It was very unfortunate that I could not, last voyage, make visits (and long ones too, as I had hoped) to many islands where in the voyage before I had met with such remarkable tokens of good-will, especially Leper’s Island and Santa Cruz, but I think that if I can make a regular good round next time, it may be all as well.  I imagine that in a great many islands it would now