and Sebituane very much the same sort of
person. I was prevented by fever and other matters from at
once following up the glorious object of this journey: viz.,
while preaching the gospel beyond every other man's line of
things made ready to our hands, to discover a healthy
location for a mission, and I determined to improve the time
by teaching to read. This produced profound deliberation and
lengthened palavers, and at length the chief told me that he
feared learning to read would change his heart and make him
content with one wife like Sechele. He has four. It was in
vain I urged that the change contemplated made the affair as
voluntary as if he would now change his mind from four to
thirty, as his father had. He could not realize the change
that would give relish to any other system than the present.
He felt as the man who is mentioned by Serles as saying he
would not like to go to heaven to be employed for ever
singing and praising on a bare cloud without anything to eat
or drink....

"The conversion of a few, however valuable their souls may
be, cannot be put into the scale against the knowledge of the
truth spread over the whole country. In this I do and will
exult. As in India, we are doomed to perpetual
disappointment; but the knowledge of Christ spreads over the
masses. We are like voices crying in the wilderness. We
prepare the way for a glorious future in which missionaries
telling the same tale of love will convert by every sermon. I
am trying now to establish the Lord's kingdom in a region
wider by far than Scotland. Fever seems to forbid; but I
shall work for the glory of Christ's kingdom--fever or no
fever. All the intelligent men who direct our society and
understand the nature of my movements support me warmly. A
few, I understand, in Africa, in writing home, have styled my
efforts as 'wanderings.' The very word contains a lie coiled
like a serpent in its bosom. It means traveling without an
object, or uselessly. I am now performing the duty of writing
you. If this were termed 'dawdling,' it would be as true as
the other.... I have actually seen letters to the Directors
in which I am gravely charged with holding the views of the
Plymouth Brethren, So very sure am I that I am in the path
which God's Providenc