he
writer said they were beginning happier lives in which the awful
terror of the javelin and the club, and the horror of demons and
witches was gone.

When Mr. Meikle had finished reading the magazine he folded it up
again and then looked round on all the boys in the school, saying:

"I wonder if there is a boy here this afternoon who will become a
missionary, and by and by bring the Gospel to other such cannibals as
those?"

Even as the minister said those words, the adventurous heart of young
Chalmers leapt in reply as he said to himself, "Yes, God helping me, I
will."

He was just a freckled, dark-haired boy with hazel eyes, a boy
tingling with the joy of the open air and with the love of the heave
and flow of the sea. But when he made up his mind to do a thing,
however great the difficulties or dangers, James usually carried it
through.

So it came about that some years later in 1866, having been trained
and accepted by the London Missionary Society, Chalmers, as a young
man, walked across the gangway to a fine new British-built clipper
ship. It had been christened _John Williams_ after the great hero
missionary[34] who gave up his life on the beach of Erromanga.

This boy, who loved the sea and breathed deep with joy in the face of
adventure and peril, had set his face towards the deep, long breakers
of the far-off Pacific. He was going to carry to the South Seas the
story of the Hero and Saviour Whom he had learnt to love within the
sound of the Atlantic breakers that dashed and fretted against the
rocks of Western Scotland.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 34: See Chapter VII.]

CHAPTER XIII

THE SCOUT OF PAPUA[35]

_Chalmers, the Friend_

(Date of Incident, about 1893)

The quick puffing of the steam launch _Miro_ was the only sound to
break the stillness of the mysterious Aivai[36] River. On the launch
were three white people--two men and a woman. They were the first who
had ever broken the silence of that stream.

They gazed out under the morning sun along the dead level of the
Purari[37] delta, for they had left behind them the rolling breakers
of the Gulf of Papua in order to explore this dark river. Away to the
south rolled the blue waters between this vast island of New Guinea
and Northern Australia.

They saw on either bank the wild tangle of twisted mangroves with
their roots higher than a man, twined together like writhing serpents.
They peered through the thick bush with its green