_May 21._—The mail for the Livingstonia Mission has arrived from Scotland, and we learn now from a newspaper that all the Missionaries that were labouring at Blantyre during the time that the settlement was a colony have been recalled, and to some extent censured; but the grounds on which the Directors have proceeded are by no means clear. At all events the same method if carried out consistently would have recalled all the Missionaries that had laboured at the two Scotch Missions. The Church of Scotland through the Blantyre Committee first established a colonial settlement. While this settlement was in full swing I was asked to join it as a clergyman. All the Directors ought to have been well aware that they could not require a minister of the church to act as a magistrate, or to interfere in such civil jurisdiction. They understood that the secular department was getting on very successfully, and seem to have imagined that the colonial government which they had set up would protect the minister in his special work, just as clergymen and others are under the protection of the civil powers in Britain. Hence I had been officially and specially instructed to leave such matters to the lay agents of the Mission, who were presumably more familiar with them than clergymen, and when I reached Africa the enormous claims that the Missionary work of the settlement made upon me left me no time to consider anything else. If a man desires to be signally useful in any department of activity, his motto must be “this one thing I do”. But as the whole subject was now examined by persons that did not know its special circumstances, I was held responsible for carrying out the details of a policy in which I never interfered.[11] So far as the colonial work came under my notice, I had watched it with interest, and I found that in many respects my own views were entirely against the policy that had been sanctioned at home. This morning I went round Ndilande for the purpose of finding a spot where I could form another Mission Station. It will be a great pity to leave these poor people because of the censure of Directors who know so little about the subject. _May 28._—I went over to visit Mr. Buchanan at Zomba. The inhabitants of the villages I passed through, all knew that Kapeni’s children had gone to stay at the Mission Station, and they talked of this as if it had been quite a new feature in our work. The villagers thought that it was a great advance and said, ‘O father all our children will now come to learn!’ On stopping for food in the forenoon, we found that we had no matches, and it seemed therefore that we could cook no dinner. But the natives in a few minutes produced fire by friction, and then carried a piece of burning wood all the rest of the journey. Almost every party of native travellers has its fire-carrier who is appealed to when his companions wish to smoke, and who is able to light the fire at a halting-place without any delay.