“He is not young—about fifty or sixty years old,” was the reply; “he was just a common native.”
“A very uncommon native,” said Mr. Lawrence, “if you have seen, as I have reason to suppose, the Karen apostle, Ko Thah Byu. I have been expecting him to pass through Moulmein, and am heartily glad that he has come. I shall feel my house honoured if that Karen evangelist sleep to-night under my roof.”
“He does not look as if he were much accustomed to sleep under roofs,” observed Thud. “I daresay that the beggar has seldom had anything better than a tree over his head.”
“You judge correctly,” said Mr. Lawrence. “Ko Thah Byu was originally but a village boy, and he was afterwards the servant of Mr. Hough, and then of a native Christian.”
“I daresay that he was a bad servant,” observed Thud, who was rather annoyed at his dangerous rebel and incendiary proving to be nothing but a harmless preacher.
“Again you are right, Mr. Thorn,” said the chaplain: “the now devoted Christian was, before his conversion, a very bad servant and a very bad man. But when Ko Thah Byu became a believer in Christ, he also gradually became an altered character. If there ever were in this dark land a devoted and successful evangelist, that evangelist is Ko Thah Byu.”
“I daresay that he is successful in taking in missionaries,” remarked Thud; “they will find him out to be a hypocrite in the end.”
Io saw that both the gentlemen looked annoyed at the idle remark, and she made a diversion in the conversation.
“Thud, you know less of missions and converts than of natural history,” she playfully observed. “Tell us the result of your scientific researches to-day. Had the wild elephant a trunk, or a snout according to your new theory?”
Thud looked sulky but not disconcerted. “This one had a proboscis,” he reluctantly owned; “but exceptions prove the rule.”