fragile. In the very height of summer they had to wear corduroy
trousers, blue serge shirts, red woollen comforters, and blue Scotch
caps, and the more delicate a thick woollen jersey in addition; and
with all these precautions they were continually catching cold, or
getting disordered, and then the Bauro and Grera set could only
support such treatment as young children generally need. The Loyalty
Islanders were much tougher and stronger and easier to treat, but
they too showed that the climate of Auckland was a hard trial to
their constitutions.

On the last day of March came tidings of the sudden death of the
much-beloved and honoured Dr. James Coleridge of Thorverton.

'It is a great shock,' says the letter written the same day; 'not
that I feel unhappy exactly, nor low, but that many many memories are
revived and keep freshening on my mind.... And since I left England
his warm, loving, almost too fond letters have bound me very closely
to him, and sorely I shall miss the sight of his handwriting; though
he may be nearer to me now than before, and his love for me is
doubtless even more pure and fervent.

'I confess I had thought sometimes that if it pleased God to take you
first, the consciousness that he would be with you was a great
comfort to me--not that any man is worth much then. God must be all
in all. But yet he of all men was the one who would have been a real
comfort to you, and even more so to others.' To his cousin he
writes:--


'Wednesday in Passion Week, 1858: St. John's College.