that I have written this.  For, indeed, I do sympathise with you, and I think how to me, who knew him so little yet yield to no one in deep reverence and love for him, his departure would be almost what the passing away of one of those who had seen the Lord must have been to those of old time; yet our time is not so very long now, and may be short, and we have had this blessed example for a long time, and there is on all accounts far more cause for joy than for sorrow.

’You must not think me unkind to Miss Mackenzie, because I have written to Fan to say that my letters and anecdotes are not to be fishes to swim in her “Net.”  It may be unwise in me to write all that kind of thing, but it does such an infinity of harm by its reflex action upon us who are engaged in this work.  And I can write brotherly letters, if they are to be treated as public property.  I could not trust my own brother to make extracts from my letters.  No one in England can be a judge of the mischief that the letters occasion printed contrary to my wish by friends.  We in the Mission think them so infinitely absurd, one-sided, exaggerated, &c., though we don’t mean to make them so when we write them.

’We are all well, thank God, except a good fellow called Walter Hotaswol, from Matlavo (Saddle Island), who is in a decline.  He has had two bad haemorrhages; but he is patient, simple-minded, quite content to die, and not doubting at all his Father’s love, and his Saviour’s merits, so I cannot grieve for him, though he was the one, humanly speaking, to have led the way in his home.

’You know that I sympathise with all your anxieties about Church matters.  Parliamentary legislation would be the greatest evil of all.  All your troubles only show that synodical action, and I believe with the laity in the Synod, is the only cure for these troubles.

’God bless you, my dear Cousin,

’Your affectionate Cousin,

‘J.  C. Patteson.’

To the sisters he wrote at the same time:—­

’I hear from Miss Yonge that Mrs. Keble is very ill—­dying.  But, as I wrote to her, why should such things grieve us?  He will soon rejoin her, and so it is all peace and comfort.  He was seventy-five, I think, last St. Mark’s Day, and I began a letter to him, but it was not fair to him to give him the trouble of reading it, and I tore it up.  He knows without it how I do love and revere him, and I cannot pluck up courage to ask for some little book which he has used, that there may be a sort of odour of sanctity about it, just as Bishop Mackenzie’s Thomas a Kempis, with him on the Zambesi, is on my table now.’