MANY years ago, before the steamers came to Samoa, when the whites depended on sailing-ships for their precarious¹ supplies and their meagre news of the outside world, the Rev². Wesley Cook reached the Islands to take up the Lord’s work in that troubled field. He was a good-looking young man with a weak chin, rather regular features, and an abundance of yellow, fluffy³ hair, who had trod since earliest infancy⁴ the narrow path that leads to a missionary⁵ career. An assiduous church-member, a devout⁶ Sunday-school scholar, he had climbed, rung by rung, the religious ladder, and his sanguine⁷, sensitive nature had flowered in an atmosphere which would have stifled⁸ a bolder boy. At nineteen he was fed into a sectarian college like corn into a mill, and at twenty-two the machine turned him out into the world, an undistinguishable unit of the church to which he belonged. Then, after a quiet month with his old mother, whose heart overflowed¹⁰ with the measure of her son’s success, the Rev. Wesley was bidden to marry and depart.

 

There were plenty to advise him at this juncture¹¹, and half a dozen young ladies were entered, so to speak, for the matrimonial steeplechase. But Wesley, contrary to all expectation and not a little to the[128] chagrin¹² of the narrow set in which he moved, showed some determination to have his own way in this important matter, and after a brief courtship he carried Miss Minnie Chandler to the altar. She was the proud and