COLD, cold it is very cold Without the house; the year is old! om When the icicle hangs where the swallow found rest; And a few of Earth's wise things when summer was No food and no fire; but sickness, with care And poverty, dreary companions! are there. -- Oh! sweet to sit around the board That Providence hath blessed,And sweet to draw the curtain round our warm and sheltered rest; To see the faces at whose smile the household hearth grows bright; And to feel that, 'mid the darkness, in our dwellings there is light! If we have done what love might do, and wished that it were more, To keep the grim wolf yet a while without the poor man's door; And if our day hath not gone down, without its kind relief, To some of those its sad dawn woke to misery and grief, We need not fear the frost and cold, we have found out a charm To keep our House, and Home, and Heart, and all our Being warm! Kind Christmas comes with all its gifts, and absent friends seem near; And the Christian hails earth's darkest day for the brightest in his year; And there is peace, and there is joy, and there are anthems sung, As once by angels in the air, when Christmas-time was young And our hearts learn the tones of that happy psalm. Warm, warm! it is very warm! PASTOR HARMS OF HERMANNSBURG. III.-NEW HERMANNSBURG. It is now high time to return to the "Candace," which was left cruising up the eastern coast of Africa in search of the Gallas. A storm drove it out into the Indian Ocean, and it was not till after much patience had been spent that the anchor was dropped at Zanzibar. Zanzibar was the key of the position. The coast, from Cape Delgado to Cape Gardafui, is ruled by a certain powerful and despotic Imaum of Muscat, and without his permission the mission could have no beginning, for the Gallas being an interior tribe, the way to them led through the Imaum's territory. This Imaum himself was absent, but from his son a verbal permission was obtained to settle on the island of Mombaz, about 150 miles farther up, and to wait there an order for a visit inland. The missionaries requested this permission in writing, but he informed them with so much courtesy that it was unnecessary-he had even sent a swift ship with directions for their reception-he was so polite, and his court so very courtly, that they, good, | simple-minded men would not venture a doubt, and set off with all convenient speed. Then the very sea fought against them; and five times as they approached within sight of the harbour, a strong current hurried them irresistibly out of their course. When this difficulty was conquered others remained. Mombaz is an island, and they wished a footing on the mainland; the Governor could give them no help without a written order, and as they learned afterwards the swift ship had borne strict orders against their residence even in the town. They had letters to Krapf-a name that will soon bear among us a reputation kindred to Livingstone's; and in his absence they sought the missionary, Rebmann, who was settled fifteen miles off among the Wanika. Such a visit would not be tolerated; but a compromise was effected by which a native messenger was sent for Rebmann, who came at once to Mombaz, and remained for three weeks. He could obtain no relaxation from the governor, and counselled a return to PortNatal. The missionaries heard this with heavy hearts. They could not lightly give up their cherished project and let tidings of failure be brought back to Hermannsburg. They knew how their pastor would feel. He says himself the first news lay like an Alp upon his heart, day and night, for many days. And with an incredible boldness and some want of prudence, for they had no guide, knew nothing of the country, and had the Imaum against them, three of them determined to penetrate to a border tribe called the Pakolo, and effect a settlement there. After wandering some days they found it was too distant, managed to make out Rebmann, and returned to the ship. The result was an immediate order for all to leave; and as the wind was contrary, boats were sent to help them out of the harbour, while the Arabs in triumph screamed at the pitch of their voices. He One of them, Meyer, gives a lively picture of the island. He had some knowledge of medicine, proved useful to the Governor, was allowed to practise in the neighbourhood, and made good use of his peculiar facilities for observation. He is lost in wonder at the beauty of the tropic scenery; the noble forest of cocoa-palms where the trees rise 100 feet without a branch; the oak-like breadth and leafiness of the mangoes; the huge cactuses with their flowers of flame; the dense underwood starry with various blooms; the masses of colour that met the eye from plants that creep over the ground, and wreath in trellis-work from tree to tree and swing their heavy perfume through the air; and the giant grass, where a man is hidden, and where the green is fresh and vivid as corn-fields in summer. makes shrewd, farmer-like comments on the agriculture, and is indignant that instead of ploughing the land, it is only scraped to the depth of an inch and half. "A lazy people," he says; "they eat and drink, and smoke tobacco: that is the occupa tion of a gentleman." To this he attributes the misery of the population. The only healthy people are the slaves; the rest are lame, weak-eyed, fall of sores, with limbs that rot off from disease, a growing unhealthiness of the entire body from childhood to maturity. As Mohammedans they fast, and their fasts are thus: "they eat nothing by day, but make up for it by gluttony all night, so that in the Ramadan a stranger can get neither butter nor meat." A physician's practice in such a neighbourhood could be no sinecure, and Meyer, who was accompanied on his visits by a great retinue of people, and sometimes by the Governor and his suite, found the streets thronged with the diseased, begging him to heal them, till with the ship the doctor was banished also. On the 2d August 1854, the ship reached Port Natal. There were now three courses open, either to place themselves under the Bishop of Natal, to which they had sound objections; or to settle on government land; or to purchase ground for a colony. The second as the less expensive was adopted; and their difficulties began again. The first time they touched at Port-Natal a report had preceded them that it was a ship full of Jesuits, that the people must beware. But as in the early morning they blew a German choral on their long trumpets as their fashion is-a German, who stood on shore, cried out that these were no Jesuits but Lutherans, and the suspicion was dissipated. And now when they went to the Governor for permission to settle, he declared that he would never allow them an inch of the regal domains, and that the sooner they left the country the better. This blow fell on them sadly and incomprehensibly, for they had brought letters of recommendation from the English Government. It was explained later. The captain, who turned out badly, had informed the Governor that they were revolutionizing demagogues; and he, it seems, was nothing loath to believe it. No squatting being permitted, they were driven to the third course, of a regular purchase, and not very far from Peter Moritzburg, they secured a property of 6018 acres for £630. A tolerable river flows through it; there is lime, and coal, and stone; much of it is arable, and the rest pasture; but the wood was scanty, and timber for building was not to be had within four hours' journey. The position of the settlement as a mission fortress and centre was good. It was under English protection; it was not inconveniently distant from the sea; it touched on the most important tribes of southern Africa; and by penetrating northward from tribe to tribe, it was still possible to reach the Gallas. Within the Natal colony there were as many as 100,000 Zulu Kaffirs; above it there was the largest body of the Zulus under the chieftainship of Umpanda; further on were the Matabele, ruled by the fierce Moselekatse; the Boers of the Orange River lay to the west, and beyond them the large tribe of the Bechuanas. In their immediate neighbourhood were five-and-twenty Germans, who had been sent out to grow cotton and sugarcane, and among whom one of Gossner's missionaries was settled. And the religious state of the population, white and black, was pitiful. A Dutch peasant being asked of what religion he was, replied, "he supposed as he was an African, his religion must be the same." The morals were often on a par. Two farmers who lived within easy distance had, the one a daughter and the other a wife; to equalize matters, they effected an exchange: the former married the latter's wife, and the latter married the former's daughter. Such an incident may have occurred, as Livingstone, in writing of the Boers, suggests, from their intense desire for children, and he quotes an illustration from his own experience, where a childless farmer followed the example of Abraham. But it is nevertheless a sign of very low morality; and when the dominant white race acts thus, there cannot be much expected from the savage. Isolated among the heathen, and removed from every Christian influence, the heathenism of the so-called Christian is the necessary result. Having secured their purpose, the next step of the colonists was to build; and a house was hastily put together till a more permanent structure could be undertaken. Permission to fell wood in the Government domains was granted for a pound a month. Some of the brethren went there, and to save time camped on the spot. One of those who remained was set over the farming, another combined the callings of gardener and thatcher; a third got the bricks ready; one superintended the housekeeping; and the dyer was elected cook, no light responsibility where there were one-andtwenty persons to dine. And out of this imperious necessity of eating, it came that the first structure was a kitchen, in which the cook luxuriated, till the smith seized one corner for his anvil and bellows, and speedily burnt off the roof. This was intolerable, and the offender was turned out into a house by himself; but one night the rain washed it away, whereupon, to the intense satisfaction of the cook, the brethren swiftly rebuilt it, saying quietly, that mistakes were good teachers. The settlement was thoroughly at work. The cook was not the only busy man in the community. The smith was encroaching on him, and the forge was never idle. Sometimes a wagon was wanted and sometimes a team of cattle, expensive things in a land where a pound sterling did not go as far as the German thaler; and of money there was an apostolic scarcity. But the smith paid them back in work, and the barter proved every way satisfactory. Then twenty acres were cleared and brought under the plough, flax was sown, maize was plentiful, wheat was tried, cattle were herded over the pastures, sheep were bought, and there was soon a tolerable farm-yard, noisy with cackling of hens and cock-crowing, and lowing of cattle, and the deep bark of two famous watch-dogs. The river had to be angled for fish, and an occasional shot brought down a buck or a peacock. Some time and skill were spent in oxen-taming, in which two of the brethren acquired a reputation and even got the use of a team for a year and a half by breaking them into draught. The wood-cutters were toiling without pause, and then trying their hand at Kaffrarian round the camp fire. And indeed the learning of the language became the most formidable work of all. For they did not spend their energy in mere outward arrangements. They kept steadily before them the purpose of their colony, and every spare moment practised the native tongue; if a man got knocked up in the woods, he recruited himself by a month's study of Kaffir with Posselt. The structure of the language is simpler than German, they say, but the pronunciation is hard; "yet the Lord will help." "I have seen them," says Posselt, writing to Harms, "struggling with these clicks and clacks till their eyes turned round in their head. It is a hard nut for them to crack; but they are indefatigable and they never flinch; real martyrs in the cause." The language is a lamentation in their letters for years they were only simple peasants of the heath; elderly men some of them, more used to a spade * The Berlin Missionary. than a grammar; and it is to their credit that they manfully overcame the difficulties in their way, instead of falling back upon pastoral duty among the scattered Europeans. Meanwhile their hearts were burning within them for some speech with the natives, and until able directly, they spoke as they could through interpreters. Nor were they slow to practise with any native who might be at hand, though they sometimes fell into odd blunders. One of them was seen one day in a lively dialogue with a Kaffir; they both grew warmer, and with manifest diversity of sentiment. "What are you saying?" said a bystander. 'Oh, the man wants work from us; but he asks eight shillings a month, and I won't give him so much." A Kaffir woman, who knew something of Dutch, passed soon after. "What does the man want?" cried the perplexed missionary. "He wants you to pay him a shilling that is owing for maize; he wouldn't work an hour." Such misconceptions must have led to great puzzles in religious conversation, and urged on the missionaries with all the more eagerness to master the language; so that with lexicons, building, farming, study, cookery, tailoring, some exploration of the neighbourhood, missionary tours among the whites, and the necessary services of their own worship, to say nothing of the practice of chorales on the long trumpets, they had no spare time upon their hands. Harms, careful and thoughtful at home, warned them of the African laziness, of a lady-and-gentleman existence. They wrote him in reply: "A bell rings us up at half-past five; we have worship at six; after coffee every one hurries off to his work; for breakfast we have bread and milk; the bell rings from work to dinner at twelve; at half-past one there is coffee, and then to work again as long as our dear God lets the sun shine." The work embraced everything: mission teaching and handicraft, the household and the church. The fate of the first smithy had delayed the erection of a permanent and suitable dwelling till the dry weather. It was accomplished, however, with entire success and on a large scale, and formed a range of building 120 feet long by 40 wide. This became the nucleus of the African Mission, and received the name of New Hermannsburg. Other houses rose up about it; Kaffir huts were dotted round; the stores of the settlers were kept at it; the arable ground reached out from it into the jungle; and it became a place of some importance, sufficient to attract the attention of a friendly English magistrate, and through him of the Government. The tax on the timber was remitted, so was the groundrent of their property; messages were despatched to the neighbouring Kaffir kraals, urging that the children should be sent to the brothers' school; and at last a despatch arrived from Lord Clarendon, recognising the admirable character of the mission, and recommending it to special care, while 3000 acres additional, out of the Government land, were allocated to the settlement. With the arrival of Sir G. Grey, came still brighter prospects. He is reported to have said, that if he were not a governor he would be a missionary. Whatever truth may be in this, his interest in missions is well known. His familiarity with their working, and his experience of the relations between European and savage races, led him to a higher estimate of their value than is at all common to colonial rulers. He recognised in them the true pioneers of civilisation; the true security of the country and the certainty of its development not only from the European but from the native side. And with these views he made grants to any new mission station of 6000 acres, grants of which the Hermannsburgers soon availed themselves. They were rapidly increasing. The old parish at home sent out a continuous stream of emigrants. Their organization was firmly established; and while Hermannsburg remained as the centre, and as a school of preparation for mission life, the emigrants founded new stations. They had now a service in | Kaffrarian, well attended and blessed with happy results. They had converts settled round them and learning industrious habits. They had many more, not converts, but in some way attracted to them, willing to be taught reading in the school, and helping them at work. The white families near them showed a wonderful change. Drunkards became sober and diligent; gamblers threw away their cards; where the Bible had never been opened, there was a daily confession of Christ; there were entire families that blessed God for what had been wrought in their households; and these persons had before been incredibly degraded, and almost without a sense of religion. This progress was made within a circle immediately round their chief station. The Kaffers there were under British rule. They were mostly fugitives, and every new war swelled their numbers. They lived in scattered kraals, and had headmen, but no king. There was no great difficulty in bring ing the gospel to their doors, for there was perfect freedom to preach it. They were a peaceful race, and not altogether indisposed to work; and from their want of any leading authority and their unsettled habits, they were more easily attracted to a mission station. They were, of course, peculiar people to deal with. They struck the Germans as powerful muscular men of an open countenance and with fire in their eyes. Their houses they represent like bee-caps; their household goods as an assagai, some clubs, a mat, a piece of wood for a pillow, and a great horn pipe. A man has as many huts as he has wives; and a wife is bought for ten or twenty oxen. When an ox is killed, so many assemble that it is devoured at one meal. "Ten Kaffirs will eat an ox in four-and-twenty hours; but after that they can fast for four days." They will work, but they must be punctually paid; and if at the end of the month their wages are not forthcoming, they will not move from the place. Credit, even for a day, is abhorrent to their notions; a punetiliousness that once or twice cost the missionaries no little trouble when they were unprovided with change. When they work it is not continuously. They marvel at the untiring Saxon energy, and take a holiday after a few weeks of labour. They are intelligent; very subtle thinkers, and skilled in fence of reasoning, though their mode of procedure is singular. An intelligent English chaplain was one day debating with a Kaffir, the existence of the invisible God. "Your God is up there?" he retorted at last, pointing to the sky; and then with great gravity picked up a stone, and flung it with all his force into the air. When he saw it come down again, he cried with disdain: "If your God was there, do you think that he could not have caught that stone?" and gathering his kaross about him, he went off with a triumphant laugh, swinging with great steps over the plain. Their rain-doctors are no easy antagonists in discussion, and play with words and sophisms quite as ably as if they belonged to our civilized society. Their nakedness, their morality, their dances, their marriage customs, were a great shock to people who had never seen a heathen before; their horror can scarce find expression; they write of every ceremony as the work of the devil; they fight against it as such; if they are invited to a feast, they soon rush out to wrestle in prayer against the kingdom of Satan; their soul is moved within them, so that they cannot settle down in tolerance as spectators, but in their valiant, straightforward faith, they directly challenge every evil. "We are often filled with such nausea and loathing, that we could run away if it were not that love and pity withhold us.' But these men have gentle and winning ways, and their good faith and sim plicity give point to their words; the heathen Kaffirs like to live near them, the children are diligent and affectionate in the school. There was one drawback, that the circumstances of these natives precluded the hope of any great influence among them. They were so unconnected with each other, that it was only an isolated family here and there that came under missionary influence, and this influence remained isolated in that family. Further off, lay the great tribes, lying densely to gether, and united as members of a common nation. If the gospel, took hold among such a tribe, its likelihood of spreading would be enormously in creased; and from New Hermannsburg the missionaries looked wistfully westward and northward, not unmindful also of the Gallas, and praying that God would show them the way. The first step forward was the founding of a new station among the people of a Natal chief called Somahasche. He was absent when Schröder and Hohls arrived, but came back with all haste: and began: "What beautiful present have you brought? We gave him two shirts. In a twinkling he had them both on. Then he commenced a melancholy story about the state of his feet which had suffered so much on his journey to us; we understood, and gave him a pair of brilliant white stockings which he drew at once over his black legs, so that we could not but laugh." After begging the very counterpane under which they slept, he ceased, and ordered a cow to be killed. But as the salt in which the missionaries sought to preserve the meat was begged away, they were in imminent danger of starvation, Supplies came from Hermannsburg and they were enabled to remain, the chief inviting them every afternoon to his hut, when he sat with beer beside him and the people of note all round, and where "according to his notion everything was thoroughly respect able; though we dare not betray any emotion when, as we lay in his neighbourhood, he would occasionally capture an insect from his head." Some weeks passed thus, and they returned with marked improvement in their knowledge of " Kaffrarian, and permission to commence a settlement. A much more important opening followed. Beyond the Dracken Hills some Dutch Boers have established themselves as a republic. They have a bad reputation in the colony, they notoriously oppress the natives, and they have led the Government into more than one needless and cruel war. Beyond them there is a branch of the Bechuanas ruled by a chief Sechele. Sechele and his history are well known through Dr. Livingstone. He was led by him to Christianity; was filled with a thirst for learning; took every means to commend the Bible to his people, and made personal sacrifices to the truth, such as endangered his chieftainship. The Boers grew jealous of Livingstone's influence, and sought pretexts to demand his expulsion. The Bechuanas refused. The result was an attack in which many of the natives were killed, their villages destroyed, and the mission station sacked and burned, Sechele's attempted journey to England for redress, his inability from want of means to go further than the Cape, his sorrowful return, are familiar to all readers of Livingstone's book. His character inspires an unusual interest. There is a manliness and moral power in it that raises him very high above our notions of savage life in Africa. He always shows himself wise, gentle and brave, and with a mind susceptible of very high culture and very large ideas. His steadfastness to the Bible, and his sufferings for that, his efforts to make it the book of his race, his anxiety to live up to it, have won for him a general interest and sympathy; and most persons have closed Dr. Livingstone's book with regret that nothing could be added to their knowledge of him after his unsuccessful journey, beyond a few vague reports. In 1857, a message came from him to Hermannsburg, through the Boers, who perhaps regarded these German missionaries as harmless. It was to the effect that he had begun to build a church, and that he longed eagerly for teachers and besought them to come over and help him. He had not forgotten Livingstone's lessons. Shortly before, a Boer passing through his territory had been seized and brought to him for judgment. "Your white brothers have killed my young men," he said; "they have stolen my wives, my children, and my cattle, and I did them no wrong. If I would act like your white brothers, I would shoot you dead, and seize your goods. But the good white man preached here the Word of God to the poor Bechuanas ; and I will follow that Word, and send you away with your life and your goods." T It was a formidable journey of thirty days through regions of which strange stories were borne to them; but they undertook it without hesitation, in the faith that always led them. On the way they came to a former mission-station, now utterly laid waste, the missionary, Edwards, having been driven off by the Boers, and the natives having fled for defence to Sechele. Soon after, they passed Livingstone's once pleasant station of Kolobeng, also in ruins, and finally reached Sechele's residence without inishap. Moffat stayed with them some days on his way to Moselekatse, left them some Bibles, and gave them * |