He had been obliged to undertake clerical duty there, because his health was failing in his attempts to convert the aborigines.
Mr Jones was a man of grave and quiet manner, one who seemed to think much and deeply.

He habitually led the conversation, without pedantry, to religious or instructive subjects, and when lighter matter was introduced, was given rather to withdraw his mind from it to his own thoughts.
He had been little in society for many years, during which his time had been passed in the highest, weightiest, gravest, grandest of all labours,--that of studying to turn the human soul from darkness to light.

Now that he found himself in his own country again, he felt far behind most men in worldly conversation though very far beyond them, not only in religious, but in practical, useful, and general knowledge; such knowledge, I mean, as would be suited to the improvement, not merely of savages, but of the wild, lawless bushmen, gold diggers, and convicts of the Australian world.

His manners were gentlemanlike but slightly old-fashioned, and, doubtless, many a young Englander would have found matter for ridicule in some of his doings and sayings.

Not so, however, the good and cultivated Englishman of the nineteenth century.