LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE LATE BISHOP AND MRS. MACDOUGALL.
[To TEE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—As one who knew well and loved dearly both Bishop and Mrs. MacDougall, may I ask for a short space to give another view than that which your reviewer has derived from Mr. Bunyon's book ? It is dangerous for relatives to write
biographies, for if they do not ran to fulsomeness, they are apt to be,hampered by the thought how their subjects would have disliked praise, and to err from reticence.
Bishop and Mrs. MacDougall were very different characters; but they both possessed the quality of heroism in a way that will always place them in a niche apart in the memory of every one who knew them well. This heroic quality scarcely appears in the Life. They were both very modest people in all that concerned their own good deeds, and the home letters from which Mr. Bunyon has so largely compiled his biography were not likely to contain the episodes which did them most honour. I learnt many of them in conversation with my dear friend Mrs. MacDougall, and should like to mention one or two. During the Chinese insurrection, the Bishop, whose fame as a doctor was widely spread in those regions, was sent for to the rebel camp, and commanded to attend to the Chinese wounded. He refused to do so, unless an English lady who had been left desperately wounded on the ground outside, and whom the Chinese would not allow to be brought in or tended, was given up into his care. The Chinese poised their spears and ran at him—he was quite unarmed—hoping to intimidate him. He simply remarked, "You can kill me if you like, but if you do, you won't get your wounded attended to," and carried his point. When Mrs. MacDougall told me this story,
she said : "Frank never told me anything about this till I wormed it out of him by questioning him. I was proud of my husband ! "
Then, with regard to the work among the natives, I can give two instances which show that church-building and organisa- tion were not the only features of the Bishop's work. One is the story of a little Chinese girl, Net Fong, who was brought up in their house. She was baptised, and taught in every way as a Christian child. When she was twelve or thirteen, her father suddenly appeared upon the scene, and carried her off to China to be married. She told Mrs. MacDougall that she would always remain a Christian ; but her friend was very doubtful how the poor little thing's resolve would stand in a country where she would probably never see another Christian throughout her future life. However, years afterwards, when Mrs. MacDougall had left Borneo, a Chinese lady, with feet crippled in the orthodox manner, tottered up the two miles between the port and the Bishop's house, only to find another lady in her friend's place. It was poor Net Fong, and great was her grief to find her journey fruitless. She had come to show her children to Mrs. MacDougall, and to tell her that she still remained true to her Christian faith.
Here is another story. Two little boys were brought back by the Rajah from a raid against the pirates, suffering from a kind of non-infectious leprosy, which, however, incapacitated them from being put into the school with the other children. The only alternative seemed to be to send them away to the heathen tribe from which they had originally been brought (they were orphans), when Mrs. MacDougall offered to take them into her house. She was a person who liked things pretty and dainty, and I have always thought it must have been a severe trial, of a feminine order, when she had to sweep up scales of white skin wherever these little brown boys had been sitting. However, she not only kept the little boys with her, but she and the Bishop spent many pounds out of their scanty means on a Chinese doctor who undertook the cure of their disease successfully. One of the little boys afterwards became a native clergyman.
I am the more moved to try to give a true picture of Bishop and Mrs. MacDougall because, to those who had not the privilege of knowing the former, his name appears to convey the notion of an episcopal sportsman who did not object to shooting natives when he could find no other game. His unfortunate letter—a blunder which seems as if it had clung to his name, while his twenty years of missionary work have been forgotten—was written in the excitement of a triumpbant return with a large number of natives rescued from pirate slave-catchers, a rescue effected against great odds, in which every hand was perforce obliged to take its share. No doubt he was of the type of the man of action rather than of the man of thought, and in some respects had the defects of his qualities ; but he was a good man through and through, his religion was intensely real, and permeated a temper and character which must lin ve !wen naturally difficult to keep in order; and he was true to the core, as well as most kind and tender-hearted. His wife belonged to a more spiritual
order of human beings, but the union between them was a perfect marriage, and when she died, no one could wish him to remain long behind her. But those who loved them will always feel that the world is the poorer for their departure.—
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