Half fearfully I let out my wishes to my mother when she came home. She
gave me no answer; but, as I found out afterwards,--too late, alas! for
her, if not for me,--she, like Mary, had "laid up all these things, and
treasured them in her heart."
You may guess, then, my delight when, a few days afterwards, I heard that a
real live missionary was coming to take tea with us. A man who had actually
been in New Zealand!--the thought was rapture. I painted him to myself over
and over again; and when, after the first burst of fancy, I recollected
that he might possibly not have adopted the native costume of that
island, or, if he had, that perhaps it would look too strange for him to
wear it about London, I settled within myself that he was to be a tall,
venerable-looking man, like the portraits of old Puritan divines which
adorned our day-room; and as I had heard that "he was powerful in prayer,"
I adorned his right hand with that mystic weapon "all-prayer," with
which Christian, when all other means have failed, finally vanquishes
the fiend--which instrument, in my mind, was somewhat after the model
of an infernal sort of bill or halbert--all hooks, edges, spikes, and
crescents--which I had passed, shuddering, once, in the hand of an old suit
of armour in Wardour Street.
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