'Oh! dear little Pena, if you had only seen the village which, as yet, I alone of white people have been allowed to see--the great tall cocoa-nuts, so tall and slender at the top, that I was almost afraid when a boy was sent up to gather some nuts for me--the cottages of bamboo and cocoa-nut leaves--the great forest trees, the parrots flying about among the branches--the crowd of men and children and a few women all looking at, and some talking to the strange chief, "who had spoken the truth and brought their kinsman as he promised,"--the sea in the harbour shut off by small islets and looking like a beautiful lake with high wooded and steep banks--the pretty canoes on the beach, and the great state canoe lying at its stone anchor about fifty yards off, about fifty feet long, and inlaid throughout with mother-of-pearl, the spears leaning against the houses--men stalking about with a kind of club (the great chief Puruhanua gave me his);--I think your little head would have been almost turned crazy.... 'June 4th, Auckland.--We reached harbour a week ago in a violent squall of wind and rain at 8.45 P.M. Anxious night after the anchor was dropped, lest the vessel should drag. Nine days coming from Norfolk Island, very heavy weather--no accident, but jib-boom pitched away while lying to in a south-easter.... 'Your loving nephew, 'J. C. P.' The Rev. Benjamin Thornton Dudley, for several years a most valuable helper in the work, both at home and abroad, gives the following account of his own share in it, and his recollections of that first year:-- 'The first time I ever saw Mr. Patteson was in the beginning of 1856, when you (this is a letter to Mrs. Selwyn) all visited Lyttelton in the newly arrived "Southern Cross." That indescribable charm of manner, calculated at once to take all hearts by storm, was not perhaps as fully developed in him then as afterwards, and my experience was then comparatively limited, yet his words in the sermon he preached on behalf of the Melanesian Mission (a kind of historical review of the growth and spread of the Gospel), although coming after the wonderful sermon of the Bishop in the morning, made a deep impression on several of us, myself among the number.