By reef and palm Author:Louis Becke Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE WIFE OF THE REVEREND HOSEA PARKER. CERTAINLY, there was s something to wonder about, for the Reverend Hosea Parker was about the last... more » man in the world one would expect to see a lively and intelligent woman marry, for, while possessing features as homely as a stone jug, they were not nearly so expressive. Like a great many of his colleagues, however, he was not as bad as helooked, and honestly believed that Providence intended him for a great mission—i.e., to convert the heathen from his blindness. Until the age of thirty or so he had, to use his own words, been " in the world, a worldly man," earning a living as a compositor on a Boston religious newspaper largely devoted to alarmist statements about the vast numbers of South Sea Islanders who were hurrying to perdition for want of missionary effort. The confined nature of his occupation and a course of attendances at revival meetings, at one of which he fell down in a fit, had led to a serious illness, from which he recovered a "concerned" man. Six months afterwards he was accepted as a " labourer" in the mission field ; and a natural, rough eloquence he possessed so worked upon the feelings of Helen Trenton, one of the young members of a Boston church in which he was preaching one Sunday, that she—in her turn—went into hysterics. On being brought to she found the Rev. Hosea Parker and her mother by her side in her parents' house, and they being very wealthy but pious people, requested the rugged - faced preacher to question her as to whether she was feeling " concerned." The result was that —while under a sort of mild religious mania—twelve months later she became Mrs. Hosea and went out with him to the Caroline Islands. Six years' residence among the unconventional people of those parts convinced...« less