CHAPTER XXV - IN SOUTH-EAST AFRICA.—THE MISSIONARY PROPAGANDA

Summary

So Alexander Duff said farewell to India. He might have sought rest after the third of a century's toil. He was nearing, too, the sabbatic seventh of the threescore and ten years of the pilgrimage of man—a decade to which many great souls, like his own master and friend, Thomas Chalmers, had looked forward as a period of calm preparation for the everlasting sabbath-keeping. But Duff was again leaving India, and for the last time, only to enter on fourteen years of ceaseless labour, as well as prayer, for the cause to which he had given his life. It was well for him that some months of enforced rest were laid upon him. These were still the days of Cape voyages, about to be made things of the past for the majority of travellers by the Suez Canal. In the spacious cabins and amid the quiet surroundings of the last and best of the old Bast Indiamen, the convalescent found health; while the invalids whom nothing could save in the tropics, and who too often now fall victims to the scorching of the Red Sea route, had another chance or a lengthened spell of calm before the bell sadly yet sweetly tolled for burial at sea. The wearied, wasted missionary, attended to the ghaut by sorrowing friends, went on board the Hotspur, on Saturday, the 20th December, 1863.

Not only in the ship, but in Captain Toynbee, who is known as one of the foremost of Christian sailors, was he peculiarly fortunate.