faithfulness unto death both of missionaries and converts. In this
century alone three successive kings rivaled each other in persecuting
the Christians, both Europeans and native, over and over again
murdering all the missionaries. In 1841 the king ordered that all
missionaries should be drowned, and in 1851 his successor ordered that
whoever concealed a missionary should be cut in two. The terrible and
sanguinary persecution which followed this edict never ceased, till
years afterward the French frightened the king into toleration, and put
an end, one hopes forever, to the persecution of Christians. The
sisters compute the native Christians at seven thousand, and have
sanguine hopes for the future of Christianity in French Cochin China,
as well as in Cambodia, which appears to be under a French
protectorate.

I do not envy the French their colony. According to my three
informants, Europeans cannot be acclimatized, and most of the children
born of white parents die shortly after birth. The shores of the sea
and of the rivers are scourged by severe intermittent fevers, and the
whole of the colony by dysentery, which among Europeans is particularly
fatal. The mean temperature is 83 degrees F., the dampness is unusual,
and the nights are too hot to refresh people after the heat of the
day.*
[*The chief production of the country is rice, which forms half the sum
total of the exports. The other exports are chiefly salt-fish, salt,
undyed cotton, skins of beasts, and pepper. About seven hundred vessels
enter and leave Saigon in a year.]

After leaving the convent I resumed my gharrie, and the driver took me,
what I suppose is the usual "course" for tourists, through a quaint
Asiatic town inhabited by a mixed, foreign population of Hindus,