lunch, and I ask her to receive the ladies of the European colony at any party or entertainment. Nevertheless I have made an enemy. Yet she would be intolerable as a friend.... The poor little missionary lady you ask about has, I guess, been having a pretty rough time of it up country. She has not written to say so: I only gather the impression from the "on dits" which circulate here. I do not like to show too much interest in her concerns because such interest in this land of feverish scandal might be so easily and malevolently misconstrued. Before she departed from Unguja for the interior I gathered that her chief anxiety was lest her mother should think her unhappy, and mistaken in her career as a missionary. Farleigh is not so very far from Aldermaston (the address is "Mrs. Josling, Church Farm"). Perhaps one day you might find your way there and have a friendly talk with Lucy Baines’s mother and father, and intimate that I am—as a Consul—keeping an eye on the welfare and safety of their daughter and son-in-law. He—Baines—seems a good-hearted fellow, but quite incapable of appreciating her real charm, even if he does not think it wrong for a missionary’s wife to _have_ charm. She is really a half-educated country girl, with a fragile prettiness which will soon disappear under the heat and malarial fever, with the mind of an unconscious poetess, the pathetic naïveté of a wild flower which wilts under transplantation.... I mostly like the missionaries I meet out here; so you need not mind an occasional collection of Farleigh coppers and sixpennies being taken up on their account to the tune of From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, etc. Our religious beliefs do not tally; but I do admire their self-sacrifice, their energy, and devotion. They are generally specialists in some one direction—native languages, folk-lore, botany, entomology, photography, or even, as in Mrs. Stott’s case, the making of plum cakes. A very admirable solace to the soul, or—where the natives are concerned—means of conversion! * * * * * Your loving brother, ROGER. *CHAPTER IX* *MISSION LIFE*