what made him unhappy was not so much the evils which he saw but
his impotence to deal with them. So now again at Oxford he feels
"impotent," impotent this time to feel and sympathize as he would
have wished with suffering humanity. But within him was the light,
"the light which is, of course, not physical," which betrayed itself
through his wonderful smile--the same now as in babyhood; and from
his mother, and perhaps also from the young country that gave her
birth, he had inherited, as well as her great heart and broad human
sympathies, the vigour that was to carry him through the experiences
by means of which, in the fullness of time, that light, no longer
dormant, was to break into a flame of infinite possibilities.

Donald's one complaint against Oxford was that the ideas that are born
and generated there so often evaporate in talk and smoke. He left with
the determination to "do," but before going on to a Clergy School he
decided to accept a friend's invitation to visit him in savage Africa
so that he might think things over, and put to the test, far away from
the artificialities of Modern Life, the ideas he had assimilated in
the highly sophisticated atmosphere of Oxford. As he quaintly put it:
"Since Paul went into Arabia for three years, I don't see why I should
not go to British East Africa for six months!" He did not, however,
stay the whole time there, but re-visited his beloved Mauritius, and
also stayed in Madagascar.

The beginning of 1911 found him at the Clergy School. But what he
wanted he did not find there. During his Oxford vacations he had made
many expeditions to poorer London, at first to Notting Dale where
was the Rugby School Mission, and afterwards to Bermondsey. But these
expeditions had not been entirely satisfactory. He had then gone as
a "visitor." The lessons he wanted to learn now from "the People"