souls ignorant of the Saviour to believe and accept the truths
you hold out; this is your mission, and this is theirs. You come with
your families, you make a home--you stay there--waiting for the heathen
to come to you; your wife is nervous, she likes not the uncouth looks
and ways of your barbarians; she is neat and she does not like her white
floor to be soiled by the dirty feet of your savages. Nervous, neat, and
timid herself, she meets their gaze anything but smilingly--even savages
are human, and know well enough how to take a hint. Her involuntary
dislike is returned with interest, and her husband's influence and
usefulness is at an end, even before being established."

"You judge us harshly," complained Dr. Adams, glancing at the
dissatisfied countenances of his younger friends, "some missionaries
have most excellent wives."

"Do not understand me as saying one word against any missionary's wife;
far be it from me. As a class, I have no doubt they are most estimable.
But women are women all the world over, and experience convinces me that
in the place they occupy as wives of missionaries they are only greatly
in the way. Now the Roman Catholics--and I am no friend to their
religion, as you very well know--as missionaries, are those only who
have met with success. _They_ attribute it to the grace of God following
their efforts, in accordance with the divine promise, 'Go teach all
nations, and lo, I am with you to the end of the world.' I have visited
their missions in every part of the world; in North and South America,
in Africa, Europe, Asia, and many islands of the sea--and in fact this
really did confound me, though I have been almost everywhere under the
sun, these missionaries were already there, working away as for dear
life--well, as I was saying, I have been in many a place where, to get
the least comfort at all, I was compelled to put up with them; and, I
always went away soothed, refreshed, and consoled. I assure you it is
wonderful; they go among the natives, and to a certain extent become one
of them; they win their confidence, treat them kindly, share with them
food and drink, sleep in their houses and tents, and by and by
insensibly have become their masters. Then how easy to teach them
anything! Now they couldn't do this with troops of women and children
along; so I came to the conclusion that their remarkable success in the
conversion of heathen nations was to be attributed to the absence of
th