As to the district of Alfington, the distress was extreme.  The people had viewed Mr. Patteson as their exclusive property, and could not forgive the Bishop of New Zealand for, as they imagined, tempting him away.  ‘Ah!  Sir,’ was the schoolmistress’s answer to some warm words from Mr. Justice Coleridge in praise of Bishop Selwyn, ’he may be—­no doubt he is—­a very good man.  I only wish he had kept his hands off Alfington.’  ‘It would not be easy,’ says the parishioner from whom I have already quoted, ’to describe the intense sorrow in view of separation.  Mr. Patteson did all he could to assure us that it was his own will and act, consequent upon the conviction that it was God’s will that he should go, and to exonerate the Bishop, but for some time he was regarded as the immediate cause of our loss; and he never knew half the hard things said of him by the same people who, when they heard he was coming, and would preach on the Sunday, did their utmost to make themselves and their children look their very best.’

Indeed, the affectionate writer seems to have shared the poor people’s feeling that they had thus festally received a sort of traitor with designs upon their pastor.  She goes on to tell of his ministrations to her mother, whose death-bed was the first he attended as a Priest.

It would be impossible for me to say all he was to her.  Not long before her death, when he had just left the room, she said, ’I have not felt any pain or weakness whilst Mr. Patteson has been here.’  I was not always present during his visits to her, and I think their closer communings were only known to Him above, but their effects were discernible in that deep confidence in him on her part, and that lasting impression on him, for you will remember, in his letter last April, he goes back in memory to that time, and calls it—­’a solemn scene in my early ministry.’  Solemn, indeed, it was to us all that last night of her life upon earth.  He was with her from about the middle of the day on Monday until about four o’clock on Tuesday morning; when, after commending her soul to God, he closed her eyes with his own hands, and taking out his watch, told us the hour and moment of her departure.  He then went home and apprised Miss Wilkins of her death in these words:  ’My soul fleeth unto the lord before the morning watch, I say before the morning watch,’ and at the earliest dawn of day, the villagers were made aware that she had passed away by the tolling bell, and tolled by him.  This was not the only death during his ministry among us; but it was the first occasion where he gave the Communion of the Sick, also when he read the Burial Service.  Cases of rejoicing with those that rejoiced as well as of weeping with those that wept, the child and the aged seemed alike to appreciate his goodness.  In him were combined those qualities which could inspire with deep reverence and entire confidence.  Many, many are or will be the stars in the crown of his rejoicing, and some owe to him under God, their deeper work of grace in the heart and their quickening in the divine life.’