sh! hush! Maria; you must be reasonable--you must take the bad with
the good," enjoined the little Doctor from his arm-chair. "Why, you are
making as much commotion as you did when Annie said she would be a
nurse. Is an hospital ward at home so preferable to an hospital ward in
the dark continent, which is ceasing to be dark? Its sun is only too
blazingly bright, its river plains too teemingly fertile, its mountains
too grand even in the grander monotony of its deserts. There is gold in
its dust, and its rocks are glittering with diamonds. But, thank God,
that is not all. It is the great country for which Livingstone was
content to spend his life, where the Moffats made the wilderness blossom
like the rose, and Colenso won the wild heart of the Zulu to trust him
as a brother. You will have Dora and Tom next door to you, and Rose and
'little May' will be constantly coming and going. As for Annie and
Harry, how can you tell that their special gifts would not be wasted
here, as I have often thought hers would have been if she had continued
only a pretty, sprightly young lady, and not grown up into an hospital
nurse!"

"Perhaps you are right, Jonathan," answered his wife meekly, coming
round, as she did now more than ever, to his side of the question.

"Do you think Sir John Richardson's daughter, Bishop Selwyn's wife,
missed the highest calling she was capable of when, instead of
presiding over a pleasant country-house or a fine London drawing-room,
she consented with all her heart to be landed on an island in Melanesia,
and left among the native converts to help to prepare the Malay girls
for confirmation? Her husband was away in the meantime in his missionary
yacht on his noble enterprise, ready to take her off the island on his
return, and not fearing to trust her in the interval to their God whose
work she was doing," argued the old man, with a note of something like
exultation in his voice. "Annie and Harry are not going out to Africa,
as my Aunt Penny and poor Beauchamp of Waylands went to Australia in the
days of the earlier squatters, entirely for their own hand, and because
they cannot help themselves, since there is nothing left for them to do
here. Our children are going to render gallant service on which their
talents are well bestowed, of which we shall always be proud to hear.
They are, as I told you before, our hostages in the carrying out of the
great purpose of the Almighty Ruler of the universe, by which