in the afternoon, preach a powerful sermon in the evening, and
write a chapter of the most thrilling of books on missionary travel
through the night. Yet next morning would see him in his ship, with
her sails spread, moving out into the open Pacific, bound for a
distant island.

"It is strange," Williams was saying to his friend Mr. Cunningham,
"but I have not slept all through the night."

How came it that this man, who for over twenty years had faced
tempests by sea, who had never flinched before perils from savage men
and from fever, on the shores of a hundred islands in the South Seas,
should stay awake all night as his ship skirted the strange island of
Erromanga?

It was because, having lived for all those years among the coral
islands of the brown Polynesians of the Eastern Pacific, he was now
sailing to the New Hebrides, where the fierce black cannibal islanders
of the Western Pacific slew one another. As he thought of the fierce
men of Erromanga he thought of the waving forests of brown hands he
had seen, the shouts of "Come back again to us!" that he had heard
as he left his own islands. He knew how those people loved him in the
Samoan Islands, but he could not rest while others lay far off who
had never heard the story of Jesus. "I cannot be content," he said,
"within the narrow limits of a single reef."

But the black islanders were wild men who covered their dark faces
with soot and painted their lips with flaming red, yet their cruel
hearts were blacker than their faces, and their anger more fiery than
their scarlet lips. They were treacherous and violent savages who
would smash a skull by one blow with a great club; or leaping on a man
from behind, would cut through his spine with a single stroke of their
tomahawks, and then drag him off to their cannibal oven.

John Williams cared so much for his work of telling the islanders
about God their Father, that he lay awake wondering how he could
carry it on among these wild people. It never crossed his mind that
he should hold back to save himself from danger. It was for this work
that he had crossed the world.

"Let down the whale-boat." His voice rang out without a tremor of
fear. His eyes were on the canoe in which three black Erromangans were
paddling across the bay. As the boat touched the water, he and the
crew of four dropped into her, with Captain Morgan and two friends,
Harris and Cunningham. The oars dipped and flashed in the morning sun
as