'You may imagine, dear Joan, that joy and grief made a strange, yet not unhappy tumult in my mind. I came away at 3 P.M. (the wind being very fair) hoping to revisit them, and, by the Bishop of Tasmania's desire, hold a confirmation in six months' time. How I am longing to hear the last record of the three days intervening between June 25 and 28, you may well imagine.... Already, thank God, four months have passed, and you are recovering from the great shock. Yours is a far harder trial than mine. May God comfort and bless us all, and bring us to dwell with our dear parents in heaven, for our blessed Lord's sake. 'Your very loving Brother, 'J. C. PATTESON.' And this most touching account from within is supplemented by the following, by Mr. Dudley, from without:-- 'He took it [the tidings of his father's death] quite calmly. Evidently it had been long expected and prepared for. He was even cheerful in his quiet grave way. In the evening there was singing got up for him by some of the Norfolk Islanders, in one of the large rooms of the old barracks. He enjoyed it; and after it had gone on some time, he thanked them in a few touching words that went home, I am sure, to the hearts of many of them, and then we all knelt down, and he prayed extempore. I wish I had kept the words of that prayer! Everyone was affected, knowing what was then occupying his mind, but we were still more so next morning, at the service in church. His voice had that peculiarly low and sweet tone which always came into it when he was in great anxiety or sorrow, but his appeal to the congregation was inspiring to the last degree. It was the Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity, and the subject he took was from the second lesson, the Parable of the Pounds, in St. Luke xix., and so pointed out the difficulties between the reception of a talent and the use of it. He showed that the fact of people's children growing up as wild and careless as heathen was no proof that no grace had been bestowed upon them; on the contrary, in the baptized it was there, but it had never been developed; and then came the emphatic assertion, "The best way of employing our gifts of whatever kind--children, means, position--is by lending them to the Lord for His service, and then a double blessing will be returned for that we give. Hannah giving her child to the Lord, did she repent of it afterwards, think you, when she saw him serving the Lord, the one upright man of the house of Israel?"'