In the meantime services on Sunday had not been neglected. At the opening of the work none of the missionaries could speak the language, but they could read it after a fashion. So, from the very first Sunday after the work opened, endeavors were made to instill into the minds of the natives that one day out of seven was a day of rest and worship. To them all days were alike--workdays, rest days, or carousal days, as they chose to spend them. Sad to say that even the few that went to work for the white man saw little or no difference between the days of the week. It falls to the lot of the missionary to teach the significance of the fourth commandment as well as the rest of the decalogue. On Sunday the people were invited to assemble under the shade of a friendly tree, and a portion of the Scriptures was read to them and hymns sung. They are great lovers of music, so that in itself was an attraction. The first congregation was very small. Sometimes there would be only Mapita and his family, five or six in number. As the nature of the meetings began to dawn on the native mind, others would assemble with us, but in the first few months, or until the opening of school in October, not more than twenty-five congregated at one time. Acquiring the language is always a tedious, though important, part of foreign missionary work. The missionary sees the natives about him, day by day, and longs to tell them something of Jesus and His love, but is unable to do so, especially if he be a pioneer in the work and without an interpreter as we were. We had been endeavoring to study the language from the Zulu books on hand, but on coming face to face with the natives it was discovered that the set phrases we had acquired seemed as unintelligible to them as their words were to us. There were several reasons for this. One was that we had not learned the proper pronunciation and accent, and another was that their dialect differed somewhat from the Zulu, which we had been endeavoring to learn. Another, and far weightier reason, and one which, to our sorrow, we did not discover until some time afterwards, was that some natives did not speak the correct language to us. Those who had been accustomed to speaking to the Europeans had invented a jargon of their own, which they seemed to think especially adapted to the mental capacity of white people. This medium of communication is known as "kitchen Kafir."