The Rev. Charles Topready, a keen missionary, had asked him to visit him the week before he went homewards. It was the season when that countryside threshed out its millet-grain in a revel of rhythmic labor. The Bishop delighted in some of those airs that the sticks beat time to. He was greedy of fantastic interpretations as he wrote their voweled refrains down in a note-book.
'We may have a Harvest Thanksgiving in church, may we not, this coming Sunday?' he said.
Now Harvest Thanksgivings were as red rags to Topready. 'Why should we bind upon Africa a burden that irks England?' he groaned. 'Surely it is a mercy that we can start afresh on the veld with no tradition of a Feast of Pumpkins.'
The Bishop smiled and smoked and argued by the hour. His point was that festivals of the soil were serviceable for sons of the soil. That agricultural festivals were serviceable for husbandmen, pastoral feasts for shepherds and goat-herds, hunting commemorations like that of Saint Hubert, for those who hunted. His knowledge of Greece and Rome, pagan and Christian, of mediaeval England and modern Brittany helped him with many apt illustrations. Topready stuck out his chin and kept bravely to his two points the danger of materialism and the menace to the spiritual cults and festas of Holy Church as by law established in the England of to-day.
'All right,' said the Bishop, 'let us have no Harvest Thanksgiving for the tillage of African earth. That is to say not this year. But keep an open mind.' Topready promised dubiously.
That struggle and waiving of victory had put the Bishop on his mettle. He had thought out the subject to some purpose before they met again.
Here are some pages from his English diary:
Sept. 21. Preached at a Thanksgiving in Essex. 'Happy harvest fields,' quiet tints in the Vicarage garden. A sun that seemed to make better use of a short day than an African sun would of a long one. What a festival Topready might have just about this time if he only liked. The masasas tinted with copper, crimson; mauve, and pink, and other leaves showing faery green and gold.
Saint Matthew's Day. The festival of the foolery of riches when
Spring is everywhere and the sun is shining.
Oct. (date illegible). Preached at the blessing of the boats in a small Sussex harbor the herring season just beginning. What glorious girls' names some of the boats had that we prayed for 'Diana Elizabeth,' for instance, might have sailed out of the 'Faerie Queene.'