John's, who was also mine, allowed them
considerable latitude in credits. It was, indeed, a bolt from the blue
when I was informed that the merchants in St. John's were owed by the
stores the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars, and that I was being
held responsible for every cent of it--because on the strength of
their faith in me, and their knowledge that I was interested in the
stores, having brought them into being, they had been willing to let
the credits mount up. Even then I still had all my work to carry on
and little time to devote to money affairs. Had I accepted, on first
entering the Mission, the salary offered me, which was that of my
predecessor, I should have been able to meet these liabilities, and
very gladly indeed would I have done so. As it was I had to find some
way out. All the merchants interested were told of the facts, and
asked to meet me at the office of one of them, go over the accounts
with my agent, and try and find a plan to settle. One can have little
heart in his work if he feels every one who looks at him really thinks
that he is a defaulter. The outcome of the inquiry revealed that if
the agent could not show which store owed each debt, neither could the
merchants; some had made out their bills to separate stores, some all
to one store, and some in a general way to myself, though not one
single penny of the debt was a personal one of my own.

The next discovery was that the manager of the St. Anthony store, who
had been my summer secretary before, and was an exceedingly pious
man--whose great zeal for cottage prayer meetings, and that form of
religious work, had led me to think far too highly of him--had
neglected his books. He had given credit to every one who came along
(though it was a cardinal statute under his rules that no credit was
to be allowed except at his own personal risk). The St. John's agent
claimed that he had made a loss of twelve thousand dollars in a little
over a year, in which he professed to have been able to pay ten per
cent to shareholders and put by three hundred dollars to reserve.
Besides this, the new local store secretary had mixed up affairs by
both ordering supplies direct from Canada and sending produce there,
which the St. John's agent claimed were owed to the merchants in that
city.

These two men, instead of pulling together, were, I found, bitter
enemies; and it looked as if the whole pack of cards were tumbling
about my ears. I cashed every avail