uttered his celebrated and crushing retort, "Did Paul know Greek?" The
young man, his opponent, went away, silenced if not convinced.

Such a man was the Rev. Thomas Gowles in his home ministry. Circumstances
called him to that wider field of usefulness, the Pacific, in which so
many millions of our dusky brethren either worship owls, butterflies,
sharks, and lizards, or are led away captive by the seductive pomps of
the Scarlet Woman, or lapse languidly into the lap of a bloated and
Erastian establishment, ignorant of the Truth as possessed by our
community. Against all these forms of soul-destroying error the Rev.
Thomas Gowles thundered nobly, "passing," as an admirer said, "like an
evangelical cyclone, from the New Hebrides to the Aleutian Islands." It
was during one of his missionary voyages, in a labour vessel, the
Blackbird, that the following singular events occurred, events which Mr.
Gowles faithfully recorded, as will be seen, in his missionary narrative.
We omit, as of purely secular interest, the description of the storm
which wrecked the Blackbird, the account of the destruction of the
steamer with all hands (not, let us try to hope, with all souls) on
board, and everything that transpired till Mr. Gowles found himself
alone, the sole survivor, and bestriding the mast in the midst of a
tempestuous sea. What follows is from the record kept on pieces of skin,
shards of pottery, plates of metal, papyrus leaves, and other strange
substitutes for paper, used by Mr. Gowles during his captivity.



II. NARRATIVE OF MR. GOWLES. {6}


"I must now, though in sore straits for writing materials, and having