e compiled by
Dr. Thomas William Marshall in his two portly volumes on "Christian
Missions." The heathen, as portrayed by Dr. Marshall, do not in the
least resemble the heathen made familiar to us by the hymns and tracts
of our infancy. So far from calling on us to deliver their land "from
error's chain," they mete out prompt and cruel death to their
deliverers. So far from thirsting for Gospel truths, they thirst for
the blood of the intruders. This is frankly discouraging, and we
could never read so many pages of disagreeable happenings, were it
not for the gayety of the letters which Dr. Marshall quotes, and which
deal less in heroics than in pleasantries. Such men as Bishop Berneux,
the Abbe Retord, and Father Feron, missionaries in Cochin-China and
Corea, all possessed that protective sense of humour which kept up
their spirits and their enthusiasms. Father Feron, for example,
hidden away in the "Valley of the Pines," six hundred miles from
safety, writes to his sister in the autumn of 1858:--

"I am lodged in one of the finest houses in the village, that of the
catechist, an opulent man. It is considered to be worth a pound
sterling. Do not laugh; there are some of the value of eightpence.
My room has a sheet of paper for a door, the rain filters through
my grass-covered roof as fast as it falls outside, and two large
kettles barely suffice to receive it. ... The Prophet Elisha, at the
house of the Shunamite, had for furniture a bed, a table, a chair,
and a candlestick,--four pieces in all. No superfluity there. Now
if I search well, I can also find four articles in my room; a wooden
candlestick, a trunk, a pair of shoes, and a pipe. Bed none, chairs
none, table none. Am I, then, richer or poorer than the Prophet? It
is not an easy question to answer, for, granting that his quarters
were more comfortable than mine, yet none of the things belonged to
him; while in my case, although the candlestick is borrowed from the
chapel, and the trunk from Monseigneur Berneux, the shoes (worn only
when I say Mass) and the pipe are my very own."

Surely if one chanced to be the sister of a missionary in Corea, and
apprehensive, with good cause, of his personal safety, this is the
kind of a letter one would be glad to receive. The comfort of finding
one's brother disinclined to take what Saint Gregory calls "a sublime
tone" would tend--illogically, I own,--to ease the burden of anxiety.
Even the remote reader, sick of discoura