The Book of Missionary Heroes

The dark blue sky of an Italian night was studded with sparkling stars that seemed to be twinkling with laughter at the pranks of a lively group of gay young fellows as they cam...

In the court of King M'tesa, Mackay always saw many boys who used to drive away the flies from the King's face with fans, carry stools for the chiefs and visitors to squat upon,...

As the train from the south slowed down in Waverley Station, Edinburgh, one day in 1898, a black face, with eyes wide open with wonder, appeared at the window. The carriage door...

A dark-haired American with black, penetrating eyes that looked you steadily in the face, and sparkled with light when he laughed, sat on a chair in a hall in 1918 in the ancien...

In the story of Sabat that was told in the previous chapter you will remember that, for a part of the time that he lived in India, he worked with an Englishman named Henry Martyn.

An eight-year-old schoolboy sat one evening in a crowded meeting in Salisbury, his eyes wide open with wonder as he heard a bronzed and bearded man on the platform telling of hi...

One day men came running into a village in South Africa to say that a strange man, whose body was covered with clothes and whose face was not black, was walking toward their hom...

The cold, clear sunlight of a winter morning on the high plateau of Asia Minor shone into the clean, white ward of a hospital in Konia (the greatest city in the heart of that la...

Manihiki Island looked like a tiny anchored canoe far away across the Pacific, as Elikana glanced back from his place at the tiller. He sang, meantime, quietly to himself an air...

One day, more than a hundred years ago, two young Arabs, Abdallah and Sabat, rode on their camels toward a city that was hidden among the tawny hills standing upon the skyline.

The purple shadows of three men moved ahead of them on the tawny stones of the Roman road on the high plateau of Asia Minor one bright, fresh morning.[3] They had just come out...

A little old man, barefooted and bareheaded, and riding upon an ass, went through the cities and towns and villages of Europe, in the eleventh century, carrying--not a lance, bu...

In the garden in Africa where, you remember, David Livingstone plighted troth with Mary Moffat, as they stood under an almond tree, there lived years ago a chocolate-skinned, cu...

"Never," he says, "shall I forget the feeling of loneliness that came over me as I made my way back to my room. The thought that I was the only Christian in the whole district w...

The quick puffing of the steam launch _Miro_ was the only sound to break the stillness of the mysterious Aivai[36] River. On the launch were three white people--two men and a wo...

When David Livingstone lay dying in his hastily-built hut, in the heart of Africa, with his black companions Susi and Chumah attending him, almost his last words were, "How far...

After many months of delay at Zanzibar, Mackay with his companions and bearers started on his tramp of hundreds of miles along narrow footpaths, often through swamps, delayed by...

The edge of the sea was just beginning to gleam with the gold of the rising sun. The captain of a little ship, that tossed and rolled on the tumbling ocean, looked out anxiously...

XXIII SONS OF THE DESERT (_Abdallah and Sabat_) 213 XXIV A RACE AGAINST TIME (_Henry Martyn_) 224 XXV THE MOSES OF THE ASSYRIANS (_Dr. Shedd_) 236 XXVI AN AMERICAN NURSE IN THE...

The inquisitive village folk stared over their garden gates at Mr. Mackay, the minister of the Free Kirk of Rhynie, a small Aberdeenshire village, as he stood with his thirteen-...

A ship crept quietly down the River Thames on an ebb-tide. She was slipping out from the river into the estuary when suddenly a challenge rang out across the grey water.

Two men leaned on the rail of the brig _Camden_ as she swept slowly along the southern side of the Island of Erromanga in the Western Pacific. A steady breeze filled her sails....

"Pélé[24] the all-terrible, the fire goddess, will hurl her thunder and her stones, and will slay you," cried the angry priests of Hawaii.[25] "You no longer pay your sacrifices...

Twelve hundred and fifty years ago a man named Wilfrid sailed along the south coast of a great island in the North Seas. With him in the ship were a hundred and twenty companions.

The masts of the schooner _The Southern Cross_ swung gently to and fro across the darkening sky as the long, calm rollers of the Pacific slipped past her hull. Her bows spread o...

The brown crew of _The Southern Cross_ breathed freely again as the anchor swung into place and the schooner began to nose her way out into the open Pacific. They were hardened...

The rain had poured down in such torrents that even the hardy boys of Inverary in Scotland had been driven indoors. Now the sky had cleared, and the sun was shining again after...

The one, a young, keen-eyed doctor,[44] glanced quickly through the trees and occasionally turned aside to pick some strange orchid and to slip it into his collecting case. The...

It was a dark night and silent. The swish and lapping of the waters on the Port Moresby beach on the southern shore of the immense island of New Guinea, filled the air with a qu...

V THE ADVENTUROUS SHIP (_The Duff_) 65 VI THE ISLAND BEACON FIRES (_Papeiha_) 72 VII THE DAYBREAK CALL (_John Williams_) 80 VIII KAPIOLANI, THE HEROINE OF HAWAII (_Kapiolani_) 8...

XV THE MAN WHO WOULD GO ON (_Livingstone_) 131 XVI A BLACK PRINCE OF AFRICA (_Khama_) 136 XVII THE KNIGHT OF THE SLAVE GIRLS (_George Grenfell_) 150 XVIII "A MAN WHO CAN TURN HI...

CHAPTER I THE HERO OF THE LONG TRAIL (_St. Paul_) 19 II THE MEN ON THE SHINGLE BEACH (_Wilfrid of Sussex_) 30 III THE KNIGHT OF A NEW CRUSADE (_Raymond Lull_) 36 IV FRANCIS COEU...