ain through the long-backed rollers.

As they set her course to the Island of Santa Cruz the crew talked
together of the men of the island they had left. In his cabin sat a
great bronzed bearded man writing a letter to his own people far away
on the other side of the world. Here are the very words that he wrote
as he told the story of one of the dangers through which they had just
passed on the island:

"As I sat on the beach with a crowd about me, most of them
suddenly jumped up and ran off. Turning my head I saw a man (from
the boat they saw two) coming to me with club uplifted. I remained
sitting and held out a few fish-hooks to him, but one or two men
jumped up and, seizing him by the waist, forced him off.

"After a few minutes I went back to the boat. I found out that
a poor fellow called Moliteum was shot dead two months ago by a
white trader for stealing a bit of calico. The wonder was, not
that they wanted to avenge the death of their kinsman, but that
others should have prevented it. How could they possibly know that
I was not one of the wicked set? Yet they did.... The plan of
going among the people unarmed makes them regard me as a friend."

Then he says of these men who had just tried to kill him: "The people,
though constantly fighting, and cannibals and the rest of it, are to
me very attractive."

The ship sailed on till they heard ahead of them the beating of the
surf on the reef of Santa Cruz. Behind the silver line of the breakers
the waving fronds of her palms came into sight. They put _The Southern
Cross_ in, cast anchor, and let a boat down from her side. Into the
boat tumbled a British sailor named Pearce, a young twenty-year-old
Englishman named Atkin, and three brown South-Sea Island boys from the
missionary training college for native teachers on Norfolk Island,
and their leader, Bishop Patteson, the white man who, having faced the
clubs of savages on a score of islands, never flinched from walking
into peril again to lead them to know of "the best Man in the world,
Jesus Christ." These brown boys were young helpers of Bishop Patteson.
And one of them especially, Fisher Young, would have died for his
great white leader gladly. They were like father and son.

The reef, covered at mid-tide with curling waters mottled with the
foam of the broken waves, was alive with men; while the beach beyond
was black with crowds of the wild islanders who had