_ Home Life of the Missionaries. . 149 
2 
attended to. Then there are houses to be built, fences to be 
erected, garden to be cultivated, and other multifarious duties 
which keep him hard at work for part of each day. In the 
afternoon he dispenses medicines, walks out to visit some sick 
native, or it may be to settle some quarrel between unruly 
ones, and take a look, perhaps, at his yam plantations, to see 
that no roving pig has broken the fence and got in. Then, in 
the evening, there is plenty of writing to be done, there is 
preparation of the Sunday’s address, and the work of transla- 
tion. 
All this is independent of the time devoted to religious 
services, classes, and printing—which of itself, if much transla- 
tion is being done, will keep him hard at work at all spare 
times. 
Then the missionary’s wife. What does she not do? I 
might ask. She has all the duties of the wife in general, such 
as‘the nursery, the kitchen, and other household work; and 
then, over and above these, she has all the duties of a mission- 
ary’s wife in particular— such as manufacturing servants\out of 
inert native material, taking general charge of the native 
women, and forming them into classes and teaching them— 
duties as important in their own way as those of the missionary 
himself. 
In the culinary department, for instance, these ladies show 
wonderful skill in the use of the somewhat limited resources 
at hand, producing a menu, which seldom fails to tempt the 
appetite, often feeble in this hot and enervating climate. 
I would apply to them the same language that I did to the 
cocoanut-palm, inasmuch as they seem to be endued with a 
power almost creative ; for they produce such magnificent re- 
sults out of such scanty materials. 
Here is what they have to work upon. Pork and fowls, 
eggs, fish, yams, taro, sweet potatoe, beans, oranges, lemons, 
