While converts felt the propriety of abandoning their membership in the society and any participation in its ceremonies, the mission had not required of them nor deemed it desirable that they should make a revelation of its secrets. But it had occurred in the early history of the mission that one young man, Ibia, a freeman, member of a prominent family, had felt that in breaking away from heathenism and becoming a Christian he should cast off the very semblance of any connection with evil or even tacit endorsement of it. He knew the society was based on a great falsehood. As a lad he had believed Ukuku was a spirit; on his initiation he had found that this was not so; but loyal to his heathenism and to his oath, he had assented to the lie and had assisted in propagating it. He was known for the fearlessness of his convictions, and in his conversion he to a rare degree emerged from all superstitious beliefs. Few emerge so utterly as he. He therefore publicly began to reveal the ceremonies practised in the Ukuku meetings. At once his life was in danger. The two pioneer missionaries, Rev. Messrs. Mackey and Clemens, were men of exceptional strength of character and wise judgment, and had obtained a very strong hold on the respect and affection even of the heathen. Their influence, united with a small party of Ibia's own family and a few of the more civilized chiefs, was able to save his life, he being guarded in the mission-house until the fierceness of heathen rage should abate. But, though his enemies presently ceased from open efforts to kill him by force, they proclaimed that they would kill him by means of the very witchcraft power he was despising. They said they would concoct fetich charms which would destroy the life of his child, and that they would curse the ground on which he trod so that it should sicken his feet. Not long afterwards his infant child did die, and one of his feet for more than a year had a painful ulcer. The coincidence was startling, and somewhat triumphant for the heathen; but infant mortality is large even among natives, and phagedenic ulcers of the leg are very common. Ibia recognized his afflictions as a trial of his faith permitted by God. He came out of his fiery trial strong, and his life since has been that of a reformer, uncompromising with any evil, earning from his own people their ill-will by his scathing denunciations of anything that savored of superstition. He became the Rev. Ibia j'Ikěngě, member of Corisco Presbytery and pastor of the Corisco church; and Ukuku has long since ceased to exist as a power on the island.