tmas Day!

The Rev. Walter Kirke looked out moodily from beneath the eaves of his
basket-work house, and his heart sank as he gazed across the sweltering
strip of water, twenty miles wide, that divided the island of Apiang
from its neighbor, Tarawa. His brother in the Lord across the strait,
the perpetually unfortunate Titcombe (the Rev. J. B. Tracy Titcombe,
M.A., Cam.), had sent in a proa with a message of such urgency and need
that delay, let alone refusal, was utterly out of the question.

"The king has broken all his promises," wrote Titcombe, in a hand
illegible from distress and agitation. "He threatens to burn the new
church, flog the members, and spear personally the leading lights of
our infant congregation. Yesterday, on my remonstrating with him, he
gave me twenty-four hours to leave the island, calling me at the same
time a sting ray, a detached jellyfish--a white squid, together with
some other local expressions of a highly wounding and contemptuous
nature. The tiny fold is terrorized, and Thomas Najibika, my deacon and
right-hand man, is in hourly apprehension of a massacre. My wife and
little Kenneth are down with fever, and this, together with my halting
knowledge of the native language, has put me at such a disadvantage that
I have no alternative but to appeal to you. For Heaven's sake, please
come instantly and exert yourself on my behalf, or else we may lose
Tarawa for good, and put back the good work by a dozen years."

"We'll have to go, dear," said Kirke to his pretty wife.

"Yes, we'll have to go," she assented sadly.

She could not help feeling cross with the Titcombes for always muddling
things--a little unjustly, perhaps--for her own missionary path had ever
been so easy and untroubled. Mrs. Kirke was a woman of marked beauty,
whose sweet imperiousness, sympathy, humor, and tact made her the adored
of the islanders. She not only spoke native well, but with a zest and
sparkle, a silver ripple of irony, ridicule, and good-fellowship that
carried everything before it. No kings ever bothered Mrs. Kirke. Even
the redoubtable Tembinok, with forty boats full of armed savages, had
been stemmed in his Napoleonic career and turned back by her from his
projected invasion of Apiang--presenting the missionary's wife, on his
departure, with a gold-inlaid Winchester that was the apple of his eye.

"I shall make Karaitch smart for this!" she said vindictively. "I
sha'n't let him off with less than twenty