y. I wish to say--Blessed be his name. I
regret, as there always are regrets after our loved ones are gone, that
the slander which, unfortunately, reached her ears from missionary
gossips and others had an influence on me in allowing her to come,
before we were fairly on Lake Nyassa. A doctor of divinity said, when
her devotion to her family was praised: 'Oh, she is no good, she is here
because her husband cannot live with her,' The last day will tell
another tale."

To his daughter Agnes he writes, after the account of her death: "...
Dear Nannie, she often thought of you, and when once, from the violence
of the disease, she was delirious, she called out, 'See! Agnes is
falling down a precipice,' May our Heavenly Saviour, who must be your
Father and Guide, preserve you from falling into the gulf of sin over
the precipice of temptation.... Dear Agnes, I feel alone in the world
now, and what will the poor dear baby do without her mamma? She often
spoke of her, and sometimes burst into a flood of tears, just as I now
do in taking up and arranging the things left by my beloved partner of
eighteen years.... I bow to the Divine hand that chastens me. God grant
that I may learn the lesson He means to teach! All she told you to do
she now enforces, as if beckoning from heaven. Nannie, dear, meet her
there. Don't lose the crown of joy she now wears, and the Lord be
gracious to you in all things. You will now need to act more and more
from a feeling of responsibility to Jesus, seeing He has taken away one
of your guardians. A right straightforward woman was she. No crooked way
ever hers, and she could act with decision and energy when required. I
pity you on receiving this, but it is the Lord.--Your sorrowing and
lonely father."

Letters of the like tenor were written to every intimate friend. It was
a relief to his heart to pour itself out in praise of her who was gone,
and in some cases, when he had told all about the death, he returns to
speak of her life. A letter to Sir Roderick Murchison gives all the
particulars of the illness and its termination. Then he thinks of the
good and gentle Lady Murchison,--"la spirituelle Lady Murchison," as
Humboldt called her,--and writes to her: "It will somewhat ease my
aching heart to tell you about my dear departed Mary Moffat, the
faithful companion of eighteen years." He tells of her birth at Griqua
Town in 1821, her education in England, their marriage and their love.
"At Kolobeng,