restrained his hand.
I spoke kindly to him, and attended to my work as if he had not been
there, fully persuaded that my God had placed me there, and would
protect me till my allotted task was finished. Looking up in unceasing
prayer to our dear Lord Jesus, I left all in His hands, and felt
immortal till my work was done. Trials and hairbreadth escapes
strengthened my faith, and seemed only to nerve me for more to follow;
and they did tread swiftly upon each other's heels. Without that abiding
consciousness of the presence and power of my dear Lord and Saviour,
nothing else in all the world could have preserved me from losing my
reason and perishing miserably. His words, "Lo, I am with you alway,
even unto the end of the world," became to me so real that it would not
have startled me to behold Him, as Stephen did, gazing down upon the
scene. I felt His supporting power, as did St. Paul, when he cried, "I
can do all things through Christ which strengthened me." It is the sober
truth, and it comes back to me sweetly after twenty years, that I had my
nearest and dearest glimpses of the face and smile of my blessed Lord in
those dread moments when musket, club, or spear was being leveled at my
life. Oh the bliss of living and enduring, as seeing "Him who is
invisible!" One evening, I awoke three times to hear a Chief and his men
trying to force the door of my house. Though armed with muskets, they
had some sense of doing wrong, and were wholesomely afraid of a little
retriever dog which had often stood betwixt me and death. God restrained
them again; and next morning the report went all round the Harbor that
those who tried to shoot me were "smitten weak with fear," and that
shooting would not do. A plan was therefore deliberately set on foot to
fire the premises, and club us if we attempted to escape. But our
Aneityumese Teacher heard of it, and God helped us to frustrate their
designs. When they knew their plots were revealed to us, they seemed to
lose faith in themselves, and cast about to circumvent us in some more
secret way, Their evil was overruled for good.

CHAPTER XXII.
A NATIVE SAINT AND MARTYR.

NAMUEI, one of my Aneityumese Teachers, was placed at our nearest
village. There he had built a house for himself and his wife, and there
he led amongst the Heathen a pure and humble Christian life. Almost
every morning he came and reported on the state of affairs to me.
Without books or a school, he yet instructe