’I wish you could see some of these little fellows.  It is, I suppose, natural that an old bachelor should have pleasure in young things about him, ready-made substitutes for children of his own.  I do like them.  With English children, save and except Pena, I never was at my ease, partly I think from a worse than foolish self-consciousness about so ugly a fellow not being acceptable to children.  Anyhow, I don’t feel shy with Melanesians; and I do like the little things about me, even the babies come to me away from almost anyone, chiefly, perhaps, because they are acquainted at a very early age with a corner of my room where dwells a tin of biscuits.

’To this day I shut up and draw into my shell when any white specimen of humanity looms in sight.  How seldom do one’s natural tastes coincide with one’s work.  And I may be deceiving myself all along.  It is true that I have a very small acquaintance with men; not so very small an acquaintance with men passed from this world who live in their books; and some living authors I read—­our English Commentators are almost all alive.

’I think that I read too exclusively one class of books.  I am not drawn out of this particular kind of reading, which is alone really pleasant and delightful to me, by meeting with persons who discuss other matters.  So I read divinity almost if not quite exclusively.  I make dutiful efforts to read a bit of history or poetry, but it won’t do.  My relaxation is in reading some old favourite, Jackson, Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, &c.  Not that I know much about them, for my real studying time is occupied in translating and teaching.  And so I read these books, and others some German, occasionally (but seldom) French:  Reuss, for example, and Guizot.  And on the whole I read a fair amount of Hebrew; though even now it is only the narrative books that I read, so to say, rapidly and with ease.

’I wish some of our good Hebrew scholars were sound Poly- and Melanesian scholars also.  I believe it to be quite true that the mode of thought of a South Sea islander resembles very closely that of a Semitic man.  And their state of mental knowledge or ignorance, too.  It is certainly a mistake to make the Hebrew language do the work of one of our elaborated European languages, the products of thoughts and education and literary knowledge which the Hebrew knew nothing of.  A Hebrew grammar constructed on the principle of a Greek or a Latin grammar is simply a huge anachronism.

’How did the people of the time of Moses, or David, or Jeremiah think? is the first question.  How did they express their thoughts? is the second.  The grammar is but the mode adapted in speech for notifying and communicating thoughts.  That the Jew did not think, consequently did not speak, like a European is self-evident.  Where are we to find people, children in thought, keenly alive to the outer world, impressible, emotional, but devoid of the power of abstract thought, to whom long involved