’Then I must carry on all the correspondence of the Mission.  I am always writing letters.  Every £5 from any part of New Zealand or Australia I must acknowledge; and everyone wants information, anecdotes, &c., which it vexes my soul to have to supply, but who else can do it?  Then I keep all the accounts, very complicated, as you would say if you saw my big ledger.  And I don’t like to be altogether behindhand in the knowledge of theological questions, and people sometimes write to me, and their letters need to be answered carefully.  Besides, take my actual time spent in teaching.  Shall I give you a day at Kohimarama?

’I get in the full summer months an hour for reading by being dressed at 5.30 A.M.  At 5.30 I see the lads washing, &c., 7 A.M. breakfast all together, in hall, 7.30 chapel, 8-9.30 school, 9.30-12.30 industrial work.  During this time I have generally half an hour with Mr. Pritt about business matters, and proof sheets are brought me, yet I get a little time for preparing lessons. 12.45 short service in chapel, 1 dinner, 2-3 Greek Testament with English young men, 3-4 classics with ditto, 5 tea, 6.30 evening chapel, 7-8.30 evening school with divers classes in rotation or with candidates for Baptism or Confirmation, 8.30-9 special instruction to more advanced scholars, only a few. 9-10 school with two other English lay assistants.  Add to all this, visitors interrupting me from 4-5, correspondence, accounts, trustee business, sermons, nursing sick boys, and all the many daily unexpected little troubles that must be smoothed down, and questions inquired into, and boys’ conduct investigated, and what becomes of linguistics?  So much for my excuse for my small progress in languages!  Don’t think all this egotistical; it is necessary to make you understand my position.

’If I had spare time, leisure for working at any special work, perhaps eleven years of this kind of life have unfitted me for steady sustained thought.  And you know well I bring but slender natural qualifications to the task.  A tolerably true ear and good memory for words, and now something of the instinctive insight into new tongues, but that is chiefly from continual practice.

’But when I attempt to systematise, I find endless ramifications of cognate dialects rushing through my brain, by their very multitude overwhelming me, and though I see the affinities and can make practical use of them, I don’t know how to state them on paper, where to begin, how to put another person in my position.

’Again, for observation of the rapid changes in these dialects, I have not much opportunity.  For no one in Melanesia can be my informant.  It is not easy where so many dialects must be known for practical purposes, for the introductory part of Mission work, to talk to some wild naked old fellow, and to make him understand what I am anxious to ascertain.  It is a matter that has no interest for him, he never thought of it, he doesn’t know my meaning, what have we in common?  How can I rouse him from his utter indifference, even if I know his language so well as to talk easily, not to a scholar of my own, but to an elderly man, with none but native ideas in his head?