MISSIONARY ANNALS.

A STORY OF

ONE SHORT LIFE,

1783 to 1818.

ELISABETH G. STRYKER.

CONTENTS.

As I write, I have in my mind a row of intelligent boyish faces. Manly souls look through bright eyes. My heart responds to the beats of affection beneath jacket and cut-away.

I see also a row of girlish faces, in which Christian and womanly graces are dawning. I feel the warmth of pure young hearts beginning to swell with generous desires.

These are my real friends. Beyond them I see rows and rows of boys and girls whose sympathies and interest I would gladly claim.

PREFACE.

Those among us interested in the young people, the boys and girls of our Churches, somewhat realize the lack of material wherewith to stimulate and nourish these young workers. The apiarist studies the nature of the insect which must yield him its sweets, and discovers that "the nature of the cell and the food affects the difference" in the bees. We have long watched our boys and girls, and either we do not care what they yield, or we are dull not to notice that what surrounds them and enters into their minds, is surely deciding their natures. White clover honey can only be made from white clover blossoms. What they read and what they may be induced to read concerns us as mission workers. Individual tastes make many by-paths in the field of literature, but the girls all enjoy the windings of romance, and the boys delight in the highway of adventure. "But," they say or think, "Missions, their history and progress are so stupid, they have no decent heroes and heroines. We like Robinson Crusoe, and Little Women, and the Arabian Nights!" But do we not know that the stories of the lives of some of our missionaries, well told, may stand side by side, upon the book-shelves and in the hearts of our young people, with the pages of De Foe and Louise Alcott? Many a boy and girl, charmed by the life and fortune of some unreal, and oftentimes unworthy, hero, has attempted to make copy in his or her own life. Missionary lives are not lacking in the spirit, adventure and romance which are so fascinating. With these ideals in their minds, may we not expect followers of the Judsons, the Moffats, the Fiskes and the Rankins?

The writer, who has humbly undertaken to re-tell an old tale, is neither a De Foe nor an Alcott. She finds she can borrow neither of their pens. Her own, conscious of its inexperience, finds its only relief in the fact that the story is its own strength.

SAMUEL J. MILLS.

CHAPTER I.

Our country is quietly enjoying the benefits of a great activity. Foreign Missions are still feeling a noble impulse, and the origin of this force was, under God, in the heart and brain of Samuel J. Mills.

It is a name known to us, but a history almost forgotten. Only upon the shelves of some antiquarian, or in the undisturbed library of some old homestead can a volume be found bearing the title "Mills' Memoirs." Take it down, blow the dust from the leaves yellow with sixty-seven years, and you will find the narrative related in the stately, old-time style, and somewhat laudatory and expansive.

He had no son, as Adoniram Judson had, gladly to record the details of his busy life. The writer was Dr. Gardiner Spring, who laments having failed in the attempt to obtain what appeared to him to be important information. We are thankful to him for gathering even these rare fragments.

From a sketch of Salmon Giddings, the Damon Memorial, a letter from a relative of Mills, and the life of Henry Obookiah have come a few incidents and facts, but mainly in the record of Dr. Spring have we found our Story of One Short Life. Such hid treasure should find the light, even though quarried by unskillful hands.

Biographies are apt to seem discouraging, in the beginning; the attention being riveted upon the supposed hero, meets with a shock in finding it has been following the history of his great-grandfather. The scattered energies are then directed upon the grandfather, only to meet with