’2 P.M., dinner, roast mutton; my seat between the Bishop and Eota.  Fancy the long table with its double row of Maoris.  After dinner, away with the Bishop to the hospital, a plain wooden building a mile off, capable of taking in about forty patients in all.  I am to visit it regularly when here, taking that work off the parish clergyman’s shoulders, and a great comfort it will be.  I went through it to-day, and had a long talk with the physician and surgeon, and saw the male patients, two of them natives.  One of them is dying, and so I am to be now talking as well as I can, but at all events reading and praying, with this poor fellow, and a great happiness it is to have such a privilege and so on.  Came back to tea, very pleasant.  After tea made Eota, and Sydney, a young-man who knows English pretty well, sit in my room (N.B., there is but one chair, in which I placed Eota), and then I made them read Maori to me, and read a good deal myself, and then we talked as well as we could.  At 6.15, prayers, the whole party of Maoris assembled.  Mr. Kissling read the first verse of the chapter (Joshua vi.), and we each read one verse in turn, and then he questioned them for perhaps fifteen minutes.  They were very intelligent and answered well, and it was striking to see grown-up men and young women sitting so patiently to be taught.  Then the evening service prayers; and so I knelt with these good simple people and prayed with them for the first time.  Very much I enjoyed all this.  Soon after came supper, a little talking, and now here am I writing to you.

’I wish you could see the tree-ferns; some are quite twenty feet high in the trunk, for trunk it is, and the great broad frond waves over it in a way that would make that child Pena clap her hands with delight.  Then the geraniums and roses in blossom, the yellow mimosa flower, the wild moncha, with a white flower, growing everywhere, and the great variety of evergreen trees (none that I have seen being deciduous) make the country very pretty.  The great bare volcanic hills, each with its well-defined crater, stand up from among the woodlands, and now from among pastures grazing hundreds of oxen; and this, with the grand sea views, and shipping in the harbour, make a very fine sight.

’July 14.—­I write to-night because you will like a line from me on the day when first I have in any way ministered to a native of the country.  I was in the hospital to-day, talked a little, and read St. Luke xv. to one, and prayed with another Maori.  The latter is dying.  He was baptized by the Wesleyans, but is not visited by them, so I do not scruple to go to him.  Rota, the native deacon, was with me, and be talked a long while with the poor fellow.  It is a great comfort to me to have made a beginning.  I did little more than read a few prayers from the Visitation Service, but the man understood me well, so I may be of use, I hope.  He has never received the Lord’s Supper; but if there is time to prepare him, the Bishop wishes me to administer it to him.