but I hardly like you to send me so valuable a gift.  What if you substitute for it a copy of what you have written yourself, not less valuable to me, and less expensive to you?  I hardly like to write to ask favours of such people as Bishop Ellicott; I mean I have no right to do so; yet I almost thought of asking him to send a copy of his Commentaries to us for our library.  I have ventured to write to Dean Trench:  and I am pretty sure that Mr. Keble will send me his “Life of Bishop Wilson.”  But pray act as you wish.  I am very grateful to you for thinking of it at all; and all such books whether yours or his will be used and valued, I can undertake to say.  My good friend Kidding knows that I was, alas! no scholar at Eton or Oxford.  I have sought to remedy this in some measure as far as the Greek Testament is concerned, and there are some excellent books which help one much; yet I can never make myself a good scholar, I fear; one among many penalties I pay for want of real industry in old days.

’Miss Yonge will hear from my sisters, and you from her, I have no doubt, my very scanty account of a very uninteresting voyage.  I see everywhere signs of a change really extraordinary in the last few years.  I can tell no stories of sudden conversions, striking effects, &c.  But I know that in twenty, thirty, perhaps forty places, where a year or two ago no white man could land without some little uncertainty as to his reception, I can feel confident now of meeting with friends; I can walk inland—­a thing never dreamt of in old days, sleep ashore, put myself entirely into their hands, and meet with a return of the confidence on their part.  We have, too, more dialects, talk or find interpreters in more places; our object in coming to them is more generally known—­and in Mota, and two or three other small islands of the Banks group, there is almost a system of instruction at work.  The last voyage was a failure in that I could not visit many islands, nor revisit some that I longed to land at for the second or third time.  But I don’t anticipate any difficulty in reestablishing (D.  V.) all the old familiarity before long.  No doubt it is all, humanly speaking, hazardous where so much seems to depend upon the personal acquaintance with the people.

’By-and-by I hope to have some young man of character and ability enough to allow of his being regarded as my probable successor, who may always go with me—­not stop on any one island—­but learn the kind of work I have to do; then, when I no longer can do the work, it will be taken up by a man already known to the various islanders.

’I have not touched on many points in your letter.  Again, thank you for it:  it is very kind of you to write.  I must send a line to Dr. Eidding.

’I am, my dear Dr. Moberly,

’Yours very truly,

‘J.  C. Patteson, Bishop.’

The next of the closely written sheets that every mail carried was chiefly occupied with the Maori war and apostasy, on which this is not the place to enter, until the point where more personal reflections begin.