shall," said the officer, and told the chief to
explain to his people that they must not resort to further violence.

The next week an old lady in a great state of excitement appeared
in the mission compound. With her was a lad of about fourteen
summers. They were Seronai's mother and younger brother. She had been
told that her son had become a Hindu. As to what a Christian was,
she had no idea. She had never heard of such a thing. All she knew was
that her son had disgraced her, and when Seronai came she wept on him,
and called him reproachful names, and caressed him, all in turns and
all together. Seronai was very quiet, and he was genuinely sorry for
the old lady's trouble, and came to me and said: "I must go back to my
village with my mother to comfort her, and then I will return to you."

It was about a week later. We were sitting in church at evening
service, when in came Seronai, looking very hot and dishevelled. He
said that the people in his village had seized him, and tied him down
to a bed, and set a guard over him night and day. It was impossible
to escape till one day a raiding party of Wazirs came down suddenly
on the village grazing grounds and carried off about twenty camels. A
chigah was sounded, and all the able-bodied men of the village started
off in pursuit. His mother came and untied him, and he had escaped to
us, doing the forty-five miles that lay between his village and the
mission without a stop. Seronai's condition pointed to the truth of
his story, which was, indeed, a very credible one. We heard afterwards
that the camel raid had taken place in the way he related.

Seronai went on now learning about the Christian religion, but making
very little visible progress. He was zealous, and did not for a moment
try to avoid persecution by hiding his light--in fact, he seemed to
delight in courting it. Some suggested that he was becoming a Christian
in order to spite some relation. This does occasionally happen; but
there were no grounds for supposing it to be the case here. Others
suggested that he had made a bet that he would become one, but this
would hardly account for his carrying the role so far at such great
personal suffering. In short, though his spiritual aspirations were
not, as far as we could see, sufficient to account for it, we were
quite at a loss to find any other satisfactory explanation.

About a month later he disappeared once again, and then I did not
hear of him for two year