“We just felt that poor Litsi had all the more right to our sympathy, when no one else would go. They insisted that she was dead and the baby too, there was such silence round all the place. John would not let me go alone, and I would not let him go alone, so we compromised the matter by going together, and took a plentiful breakfast as an excuse for intruding on his lordship’s privacy, the Natives looking after with wistful eyes, but not one offering to accompany us to the lion’s den! I trembled violently, though I felt the Lord was with us, and was almost relieved when we found the house deserted; but John called aloud for Litsi several times, and at last she came staggering from an enclosure opposite, from which the occupant had fled when Mungaw first went mad. She was trembling with pain and weakness, and when we were going over the stile, she looked back alarmed and said, ‘You’d better not, Missi,’ so we spoke a few cheering words as we stood, and told her again that our house was open to her, night or day, whenever she needed shelter.
“Some of the Church members came to ask what was to be done with him. Tieing only made him worse; confining or shooting were the only other alternatives. To confine him was impossible. Were they to shoot him? John, of course, would not hear of that, and they asked if there was no sort of medicine to cure madness! A near friend got him away to his village, where they had a long talk, and warned him of the consequences. The moment he went, I ran off to sit awhile with Litsi. We feared she would sink under her trials, and wished she had access to the rich consolations with which we were upheld every day in our little readings both of the Bible and other books. It seemed as if the Words were printed for our express circumstances and comfort. My own morning Reading was in the Psalms, and I never felt them so suitable. The very ones I used to think David had written in a fit of indigestion were fraught with the deepest comfort and meaning, and favourite passages were more precious than ever. I never noticed before that the passage, ‘Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I,’ begins with ‘From _the end of the Earth_ will I cry unto Thee,’—so applicable to us! John and I have often remarked to each other that we had to come all the way to the South Seas to understand some bits of the Bible; and I see Bowen in his ‘Daily Meditations’ says the same in reference to India, where he laboured so devotedly as a Missionary. We have another precious book which we were reading aloud and enjoyed next to the Bible,—Boardman’s ‘In the Power of the Spirit,’ given us also before leaving Australia.
“How we wished poor Litsi could share all these privileges, and wondered if her faith were keeping alive at all, but her spirit was beautifully submissive. When I told her that, however difficult it might be for her to believe it, her Saviour God was tenderly caring for her every moment and would not let her have one more trial than she could bear, and that it would relieve her to take all her sorrows to Him, she replied, ‘Oh, I know it, Missi; my whole words now are prayer; for I have no one else to speak to, and would have gone mad if I could not have told my Saviour! I tell Him everything, and know that it is all right even if Mungaw should kill me, for he can’t harm me beyond the grave.’ I told her not a single night passed that we were not engaging in prayer for her, and she said,—‘These prayers have been answered; for he has had the wish to kill me and burn your house, and he could easily have done both had not God prevented.’