“She is thinking of your happy exemption from beholding the signs of suffering which are daily brought before my eyes in the pursuit of my vocation,” mildly replied Mr. Serle. “But if I were to stay away till I saw nothing to make me look grave,—if I were to stay away till I saw the men grow honest, and the women cheerful, and the children comely,—till there were no struggles of poverty by day, or of death by night,—I fear we should both be grey-haired before we could meet again.” Mrs. Carr did not mean anything, by her own account; and the group were, therefore, left to ponder the full significance of the missionary’s words. CHAPTER VI. BLITHE NEWS. Few indeed were the places in the island where there were no struggles of poverty by day, or of death by night. In Rayo’s hut, the poverty struggle seemed to be drawing near its close, and that of death impending. There needed the agency of no hag to touch the dwellers in the jungle with leprosy; no curse from above to make them feel as outcasts in their own land. The sunny days and starlight nights of the dry season were full of dreariness. Rayo, now the victim of leprosy in its most fearful form, passed the day in solitude,—now creeping from his mat to his threshold, and there finding that his swollen limbs would carry him no farther; now achieving with much toil, his daily walk in search of the honeycomb of the hollow tree, or of any windfall of the fruit he could no longer climb to reach. The pitcher-plant grew all around his hut, and regularly performed its silent service of preparing the limpid draught to satisfy his feverish longing; but the monkeys were now too strong for him; and often, in a state of desperate thirst, he saw a pert ape, or an insolent baboon, twist the green cup from its tendril, and run up a tree with it, or upset the draught before his eyes. If ever he got far enough to look out upon the open landscape, it stirred his spirit to see the herds of buffaloes on the hill-side, and the proud vessels on the distant main, bringing luxuries from many a clime; feeling, as he did, that the food and the wine thus exhibited to him would have preserved him from his disease, and kept Marana, in all her youth and strength, by his side. If he met a countryman, with whom to speak, his tumultuous thoughts were not calmed; for he heard tell of the high price which cinnamon bore this season, on account of the lucky damage done by lightning to the crop. To him and his countrymen it signified little whether the Honourable Company were enabled to ask the prices of such a scarce season as this, or whether they sought from government a compensation for the loss occasioned by an over-supply; Rayo and his countrymen had no part nor lot in the harvests of their native island; but Rayo had in the concerns of the rulers the deep stake of unsatisfied revenge. As often as he became sensible of a new loss of