The climate was against that simple
procedure. Therefore he postulated two things as necessary to make a
beginning--to learn the tribal language and to build a church.
He was making an attempt at both, and making little more progress than
he made in the culinary art. Only a naturally vigorous stomach enabled
him to assimilate the messes he cooked without suffering acute
indigestion. Likewise only a naive turn of mind enabled him to ward off
mental indigestion in his struggles with the language. Whatever the
defects of his training for what he considered his life work, he had
considerable power of application. He might get discouraged, but he was
not a quitter. He kept trying. This took the form of studying the
Athabascan gutturals with the aid of Lachlan's second son, a boy of
eighteen. For an hour in the forenoon and the same in the evening he
struggled with pronunciations and meanings like a child learning the
alphabet, forgetting, like the child, a good deal of it between lessons.
And he had begun work on a log building twenty by thirty feet, that was
to be a meeting-house.
He did not get on with this very fast. He laid his foundation in the
edge of the timber to lessen the distance his material must be moved.
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