lost.  Another reason why he did not go into any laborious manuscript or printing work with the various languages was, that he saw as time went on, first, that it was so very uncertain what language would come in practice into request; and, secondly, that one language would suffice for the use, in practice, of all natives of a neighbourhood.  For example, the language of part of Mae (Three Hills), in the New Hebrides, was once studied and well known.  Nothing whatever came of the intercourse with that island, once so constant, I don’t know why, and now the people themselves are destroyed almost, and hopes of doing them good destroyed by the slave trade.  And, secondly, the use of the Mota language in our ordinary intercourse here has very much diminished the need for any one’s knowing a particular language beyond the missionary who has charge of the boys who speak it.  Thus the Bishop rather handed over the language of Bauro to Mr. Atkin, of Florida to Mr. Brooke, of Leper’s Island to Mr. Price; and as the common teaching of all boys who belonged to either of the principal groups into which the school fell went on in Mota, there was no practical use in the other tongues the Bishop knew, except in his voyages, and in giving him more effectual powers of influencing those to whom he could speak in their own tongue.  Besides, he saw so clearly the great advantage, on the one hand, of throwing together in every possible way the boys from all the islands, which was much helped by the use of one language, and, on the other hand, the natural tendency in a group of boys from one island or neighbourhood to keep separate, and of the teacher of a particular set to keep them separate with himself, that, without saying much about it, he discouraged the printing of other languages besides Mota, and in other ways kept them rather in the background.  How things would have arranged themselves if Mota had not by circumstances come into such prominence I cannot say, but the predominance of Mota came in with the internal organisation of the Mission by Mr. Pritt.  It is impossible for one who knew Bishop Patteson intimately, and the later condition of the Mission intimately, to lose sight for long of Mr. Pritt’s influence and his useful work.’

Perhaps this chapter can best be completed by the external testimony of a visitor to Norfolk Island, given in a letter to the Editor of the ’Australian Churchman’:—­

’Daily at 7 A.M. the bell rings for chapel about one minute, and all hands promptly repair thither.  In spite of the vast varieties of language and dialect spoken by fifty or sixty human beings, collected from twenty or thirty islets of the Pacific main, no practical difficulty has been found in using the Mota as the general language in Chapel and school, so that in a short time a congregation of twenty languages are able to join in worship in the one Mota tongue, more or less akin to all the rest, and a class of, say, nine boys, speaking by nature five different languages,