He likes to smoke--there he cannot do it. He likes to read the news--no papers or magazines come there. A man likes to know how his parents and brothers and sisters are getting along when he is away, and if they miss him--there he cannot know. A man likes a pretty house, and pretty furniture, and pretty things, and pretty colors--there he has nothing but naked aridity and sombre colors. A man likes--name it yourself: whatever it is, it is absent from that place. From what I could learn, all that a man gets for this is merely the saving of his soul. It all seems strange, incredible, impossible. But La Trappe knew the race. He knew the powerful attraction of unattractiveness; he knew that no life could be imagined, howsoever comfortless and forbidding, but somebody would want to try it. This parent establishment of Germans began its work fifteen years ago, strangers, poor, and unencouraged; it owns 15,000 acres of land now, and raises grain and fruit, and makes wines, and manufactures all manner of things, and has native apprentices in its shops, and sends them forth able to read and write, and also well equipped to earn their living by their trades. And this young establishment has set up eleven branches in South Africa, and in them they are christianizing and educating and teaching wage-yielding mechanical trades to 1,200 boys and girls. Protestant Missionary work is coldly regarded by the commercial white colonist all over the heathen world, as a rule, and its product is nicknamed "rice-Christians" (occupationless incapables who join the church for revenue only), but I think it would be difficult to pick a flaw in the work of these Catholic monks, and I believe that the disposition to attempt it has not shown itself.