CHAPTER III - THE TWO SHIPWRECKS

Summary

The vision of judgment seen by the child who had been feeding his fancy on the Gaelic rhapsodies of Dugald Buchanan; the divine call to the boy as he lay dreaming among the blae-berries on the streamlet's bank; the deliverance of the youth by the flare of a torch when he and his companion were falling into the sleep of death, lost amid the snowdrifts of the Grampians—these foreshadowings were not to cease until the missionary's preparation for his work was completed. He had followed the monition of all three, not blindly, but as explained by John Urquhart's death-consecrated appeal, by Dr. Haldane's apparently premature invitation, by Dr. Ferrie's appropriate demand that he should offer himself for Calcutta, by Dr. Inglis's approval, by the General Assembly's appointment; and, finally, by ordination at the hands of the Presbytery, amid the crowd that filled St. George's, Edinburgh, and after the inspiriting eloquence of Dr. Chalmers. Alexander Duff and his wife were still to undergo the experience of the greatest of all missionaries who wrote, “Thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in the deep, in journeyings often, in perils of waters.”

The East India Company's ship Lady Holland, having filled up in the Thames with a cargo valued at £48,000, entered the Channel, shipped her passengers at Portsmouth, became windbound for a week at Spithead, and finally set sail from Ryde on the 14th October, 1829.