While the Author of the following pages has endeavoured to compose a volume that will be generally interesting and instructive, and to publish it in a form at once cheap and elegant, his principal design has been to secure a permanent record of facts, to which history can furnish but few parallels. In the prosecution of his task, however, the Author has experienced difficulties which he did not anticipate at its commencement. Having travelled a hundred thousand miles, and spent eighteen years, in promoting the spread of the Gospel, he has gathered a mass of materials, from which he could have composed many volumes with greater ease than one; and his chief difficulty has been so to select, compress, and arrange his facts as to form out of them a continuous narrative, in which the details should be given with as much brevity as would consist with faithful description. It would have been comparatively easy to have filled the volume with general statements, instead of descending to minute particulars; but mere outlines and sketches could convey a very inadequate impression of the state of Society, and the progress of Christianity among the people for whose welfare he has laboured. He has therefore endeavoured, as exactly as possible, to describe the scenes he has witnessed as they appeared to himself, and to give upon the pages of his narrative “a cast” of the images and impressions which exist in his mind.