AT SOMO SOMO 45 
and could do him no good. On being urged to forsake his 
old faith and turn to the true God, the mildness and friend- 
ship of this ‘virtuous heathen’ forthwith vanished, and seiz- 
ing the missionary’s coat, he called loudly for a club to kill 
him. The old chief was ill, but his rage made him danger- 
ous, and he clung hard; but luckily the garment was of light 
material, and Mr. Lyth, making a spring, left his coat tail 
in the hand of Tuithakau, and without taking his hat, set 
off home, where he quietly waited until his patient’s anger 
had cooled down.” 
Thus through much tribulation the seed of truth was sown 
in the dark soil of Somo Somo. After the death of the old 
king, conditions became so hopelessly difficult that it was 
thought advisable for the missionaries to withdraw from 
that center. This was done without loss of more than a 
little of the possessions of the mission families. 
Some time after this the new king was murdered, and then 
this town, “where that people of proud wickedness had de- 
spised” the word of the missionary, “soon became utterly 
deserted. Civil war, in which brother was set against brother 
and cousin against cousin, in deadly defiance, made the land 
desolate, and many fell.” But “since then the truth which 
the rejected missionaries left behind them has sprung up 
in marvelous growth.” The chiefs and the people became 
humbled, and then it was that thousands of people began 
to give up their heathen practices, to turn from their de- 
praved ways, and to reach out toward the light of that gos- 
pel which they had so long rejected. 
It was one of the author’s very happy experiences to visit, 
only a few years ago, this ancient stronghold of cannibal 
savagery, and to find that from the earnest labors of these 
self-sacrificing missionaries, light had sprung up that had 
increased more and more until the darkness was all gone, 
and a happy, joyous people now glory in the freedom of 
the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. All the awful past is 
now but a nightmare memory to even the oldest of their 
