already).  He means, “Why, we ought to be off, we shall never reach the end of our journey before dark.”  But how neatly and prettily he expresses his thought!  I assure you, civilised languages, for common conversational purposes needed by travellers, &c., are clumsy contrivances!  Of course you know all this a hundred times better than I do.  I only illustrate my idea of a grammar as a means of teaching others the form of the mould in which the Melanesian’s mind is cast.  I think I ought to go farther, and seek for certain categories, under which thought may be classified (so to say), and beginning with the very simplest work on to the more complicated powers.

’But I haven’t the head to do this; and suppose that I did make such a framework, how am I to fill it in so as to be intelligible to outsiders?  For practical purposes, I give numerals, personal, possessive, and demonstrative pronouns, the mode of qualifying nouns, e.g., some languages interpose a monosyllable between the substantive and adjective, others do not.  The words used (as it is called) as prepositions and adverbs, the mode of changing a neuter verb into a transitive or causative verb, usually by a word prefixed, which means do or make, e.g., die, do-die, do-to-the-death, him.

’Then I teach orally how the intonation, accentuation, pause in the utterance, gesticulation, supply the place of stops, marks of interrogation, &c.

’Then giving certain nouns, verbs, &c., make my English pupils construct sentences; then give them a vocabulary and genuine native stories, not translations at all, least of all of religious books, which contain very few native ideas, but stories of sharks, cocoa-nuts, canoes, fights, &c.  This is the apparatus.  This gives but little idea of a Melanesian dialect to you.  I know it, and am anxious to do more.

’This last season I have had some three or four months, during which I determined that I must refuse to take so much English work, &c.  I sat and growled in my den, and of course rather vexed people, and perhaps, for which I should be most heartily grieved, my dear friend and leader, the Bishop of New Zealand.  But I stuck to my work.  I wrote about a dozen papers of phrases in as many dialects, to show the mode of expressing in those dialects what we express by adverbs and prepositions, &c.  This is, of course, the difficult part of a language for a stranger to find out.  I also printed three, and have three more nearly finished in Ms., vocabularies of about 600 words with a true native sehdia on each word.  The mere writing (for much was written twice over) took a long time.  And there is this gained by these vocabularies for practical purposes:  these are (with more exceptions, it is true, than I intended) the words which crop up most readily in a Melanesian mind.  Much time I have wasted, and would fain save others from wasting, in trying to form a Melanesian mind into a given direction into