"NOBLE OLD ABRAHAM."
FEVER and ague had now attacked me fourteen times severely, with
slighter recurring attacks almost continuously after my first three
months on the island, and I now felt the necessity of taking the hint of
the Tannese Chief before referred to--"Sleep on the higher ground."
Having also received medical counsel to the same effect, though indeed
experience was painfully sufficient testimony, I resolved to remove my
house, and began to look about for a suitable site. There rose behind my
present site, a hill about two hundred feet high, surrounded on all
sides by a valley, and swept by the breezes of the trade-winds, being
only separated from the ocean by a narrow neck of land. On this I had
set my heart; there was room for a Mission House and a Church, for which
indeed Nature seemed to have adapted it. I proceeded to buy up every
claim by the Natives to any portion of the hill, paying each publicly
and in turn, so that there might be no trouble afterwards. I then
purchased from a Trader the deck planks of a shipwrecked vessel, with
which to construct a house of two apartments, a bedroom and a small
store-room adjoining it, to which I purposed to transfer and add the old
house as soon as I was able.
Just at this juncture, the fever smote me again more severely than ever;
my weakness after this attack was so great, that I felt as if I never
could rally again. With the help of my faithful Aneityumese Teacher,
Abraham, and his wife, however, I made what appeared my last effort to
creep--I could not climb--up the hill to get a breath of wholesome air.
When about two-thirds up the hill, I became so faint that I concluded I
was dying. Lying down on the ground, sloped against the root of a tree
to keep me from rolling to the bottom, I took farewell of old Abraham,
of my Mission work, and of everything around! In this weak state I lay,
watched over by my faithful companion, and fell into a quiet sleep. When
consciousness returned, I felt a little stronger, and a faint gleam of
hope and life came back to my soul.
Abraham and his devoted wife Nafatu lifted me and carried me to the top
of the hill. There they laid me on cocoanut leaves on the ground, and
erected over me a shade or screen of the same; and there the two
faithful souls, inspired surely by something diviner even than mere
human pity, gave me the cocoanut juice to drink and fed me with native
food and kept me living--I know not for how long. Consciousness did,
however, fully return. The trade-wind refreshed me day by day. The
Tannese seemed to have given me up for dead; and providentially none of
them looked near us for many days. Amazingly my strength returned, and I
began planning about my new house on the hill. Afraid again to sleep at
the old site, I slept under the tree, and sheltered by the cocoanut leaf
screen, while preparing my new bedroom.
Here again, but for these faithful souls, the Aneityumese Teacher and
his wife, I must have been baffled, and would have died in the effort.
The planks of the wreck, and all other articles required, they fetched
and carried; and it taxed my utmost strength to get them in some way
planted together. But life depended on it. It was at length
accomplished; and after that time I suffered comparatively little from
anything like continuous attacks of fever and ague. That noble old soul,
Abraham, stood by me as an angel of God in sickness and in danger; he
went at my side wherever I had to go; he helped me willingly to the last
inch of strength in all that I had to do; and it was perfectly manifest
that he was doing all this not from mere human love, but for the sake of
Jesus. That man had been a Cannibal in his Heathen days, but by the
grace of God there he stood verily a new creature in Christ Jesus. Any
trust, however sacred or valuable, could be absolutely reposed in him;
and in trial or danger I was often refreshed by that old Teacher's
prayers, as I used to be by the prayers of my saintly father in my
childhood's home. No white man could have been more valuable helper to
me in my perilous circumstances; and no person, white or black, could
have shown more fearless and chivalrous devotion.
When I have read or heard the shallow objections of irreligious
scribblers and talkers, hinting that there was no reality in
conversions, and that Mission effort was but waste, oh, how my heart has
yearned to plant them just one week on Tanna, with the "natural" man all
around in the person of Cannibal and Heathen, and only the one
"spiritual" man in the person of the converted Abraham, nursing them,
feeding them, saving them "for the love of Jesus"--that I might just
learn how many hours it took to convince them that Christ in man was a
reality after all! All the skepticism of Europe would hide its head in
foolish shame; and all its doubts would dissolve under one glance of the
new light that Jesus, and Jesus alone, pours from the converted
Cannibal's eye.