and hard and grim, which he was one day to be called upon to break.

CHAPTER II. A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY

The steamship America, bound for Hongkong, was leaving the dock at San
Francisco. All was bustle and noise and stir. Friends called a last
farewell from the deck, handkerchiefs waved, many of them wet with
tears. The long boom of a gun roared out over the harbor, a bell rang,
and the signal was given. Up came the anchor, and slowly and with
dignity the great vessel moved out through the Golden Gate into the wide
Pacific.

Crowds stood on the deck to get a last glimpse of home and loved ones,
and to wave to friends as long as they could be distinguished. There
was one young man who stood apart from the crowd, and who did not wave
farewell to any one. He had come on board with a couple of men, but
they had gone back to the dock, and were lost in the crowd. He seemed
entirely alone. He leaned against the deck-railing and gazed intently
over the widening strip of tumbling wafers to the city on the shore. But
he did not see it. Instead, he saw a Canadian farmhouse, a garden and
orchard, and gently sloping meadows hedged in by forest. And up behind
the barn he saw a stony field, where long ago he and his brother and the
neighbor boys had broken the stones for the new house.

His quick movements, his slim, straight figure, and his bright, piercing
eyes showed he was the same boy who had broken the big rock in the
pasture-field long before. Just the same boy, only bigger, and more man
than boy now, for he wore an air of command and his thin keen face bore
a beard, a deep black, like his hair. And now he was going away, as
he had longed to go, when he was a boy, and ahead of him lay the big
frowning rock, which he must either break or be broken upon.

He had learned many things since those days when he had scampered
barefoot over the fields, or down the road to school. He had been to
college in Toronto, in Princeton, and away over in Edinburgh, in the old
homeland where his father and mother were born. And all through his
life that call to go and do great deeds for the King had come again
and again. He had determined to obey it when he was but a little lad at
school. He had encountered many big stones in his way, which he had to
break, before he could go on. But the biggest stone of all lay across
his path when college was over, and he was ready and anxious to go away
as a missionary. The Presbyterian Church of Cana