XIV. A VISION OF THE NIGHT
She was down at Use for Christmastide with all her children about her, and was very happy at seeing the consummation of her efforts to build a new church. The opening took place on Christmas Day,
"A bonnie kirk it is," she wrote. "Mr. Cruickshank officiated, and was at his very best. Miss Peacock, my dear comrade and her young helper Miss Cooper—a fine lassie—came and spent the whole day, so we had a grand time, the biggest Christmas I've ever had in Calabar. Three tall flag-poles with trade-cloth flags in the most flaming colours hung over the village from point to point embracing the old and the new churches. The people provided a plain breakfast in their several homes for over eighty of our visitors, who therefore stayed over the forenoon. It made our Christian population look fairly formidable, and certainly very reputable as a force for uplifting and regenerating society. It looks but yesterday that they were a horde of the most unlikely and unresponsive people one could approach, and yet the Gospel has made of them already something to prove that it is the power of God unto salvation to a people and to an individual every and anywhere."
It was to her "one of the reddest of red-letter days," such a day as only comes at rare intervals, and she fell into the snare, as she said, "of being carried away with it," with the result that at night she was down with fever. This kept recurring every alternate night. It was the harmattan season, in which she always wilted like some delicate flower in the sun, and she grew so limp and fragile that she could not sit up. She felt that she would be compelled to go home in the summer with the Macgregors, but the idea frightened her, chiefly because of the stir that had been caused by the honour she had received. "I dare not appear at home after all this publicity," she said. "I simply could not face the music." As she recovered a little she superintended the work of the girls outside, and was amused at the way her advice was now received. "Jean and Annie do not hesitate to set it aside quietly in their superior way; it often works out better than mine, truth to tell— though I say it does so by accident!" This was a different house-mother from the one who ruled years before.
In one of her fever nights, tossing in semi-delirium, she had a vision. She had been following the Chapman-Alexander Mission in Glasgow with keen interest, and in the long watches her excited brain continued to dwell on the meetings. She dreamt, or imagined, that out of gratitude for what had been accomplished, two young Glasgow engineers had taken a six months' holiday, and come out with their motor car to Calabar. They spent their days running up and down the Government Road through Ibibio, singing and giving evangelistic addresses, she interpreting, the girls, who were packed into the cars, doing the catering and cooking, and the Government Rest Houses providing the lodging. "What a night it was!" she wrote. "The bairns were afraid, for I was babbling more than usual, but to me it was as real as if it had all happened. We ran backwards and forwards between Itu and Ikpe, spending alternate Sundays with the Churches, and taking Miss Peacock to her outstations, and visiting Miss Welsh, It was magnificent."
The vision did not pass away; she took it as a sign from God; and out of it in the morning she formulated a scheme which one day she hoped would be realised. "It is strange," she said, "that it has never dawned on us before. Here is the Government making use of the motor car to do its work. Why should not the Church do the same when the roads are here? It would permit one man to do the work of three, it would save strength, and make for efficiency. The reason why I have been able to go farther than my colleagues, is that I have had the privilege of using Government conveyances by land and water; to have a car and a mechanic missionary would be supplying us with a grand opportunity for multiplied service." She expatiated on the matter in letters to her friends at home, and the longer she thought of the idea, the more it fired her imagination. Within a few days she was flying over the ground in the Government car on her way to Ikpe—with many a "ca' canny" to the driver—and her experience brought the conviction that the proposal was a good one. It might be too novel a plan for the Church to take up officially, but she thought wealthy men in Scotland might materialise her vision as a thank-offering.