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Updated: May 6, 2025
At last, however, the child's lamentations ceased, and there broke upon the night air a sweet sound which stilled the merriment of the natives. It was the mellow voice of Stephen Orpin singing a hymn of praise, with a number of like-minded emigrants, before retiring to rest.
He thought of making a dash and giving the alarm, but the watchful savages at his side seemed to divine his intentions, for they grasped their assagais with significant action. "A desperate disease," thought Orpin, "requires a desperate remedy. I will try it, and may succeed God helping me." A thought occurred just then.
That sedate, and literally as well as figuratively, long-headed Scot, had felt a growing distaste to the flippant young Englishers, as he styled them, but when he saw them throw off their light character, as one might throw off a garment, and rise eagerly and sadly to question Orpin about the dying man, he felt, as mankind is often forced to feel, that a first, and especially a hasty, judgment is often incorrect.
"It could not drive a Christian to such a life," returned the girl sadly. "Oh! I wish he had become a Christian when Stephen Orpin spoke to him, but he wouldn't." "When did Orpin speak to him, and what did he say?" asked Considine, whose own ideas as to Christianity were by no means fixed or clear.
After quitting the valley they fell in with the party under John Skyd and Frank Dobson, and led by Stephen Orpin. They were much surprised to find with these their friends Kenneth McTavish and Groot Willem, who soon accounted for their unexpected appearance.
Orpin was stout of limb, broad of shoulder, strong of heart, and empty of pocket; he therefore carried a pack in which were to be found not only gloves, neckerchiefs, and trinkets for the women, as well as gaudy waistcoats, etcetera, for the men, but New Testaments, tracts, and little books in the Dutch language wherewith Stephen hoped to do good to the souls of his customers.
Stephen Orpin did not give up trade, but he prosecuted it with less and less vigour as time went on, and at last merely continued it as a means of enabling him to prosecute the great object of his life, the preaching of the gospel, not merely to those whom men style par excellence the "heathen," but to every one who was willing to listen to the good news redemption from sin!
Stephen Orpin, with the goods of earth in his waggon and the treasures of heaven in his hand, chanced to be passing over a branch of the Amatola Mountains when the torch of war was kindled and sent its horrid glare along the frontier. Vague news of the outbreak had reached him, and he was hastening back to the village of Salem, in which was his bachelor home.
Orpin here commenced to expound the Word, and to tell the story of the Cross, while the Hottentot listened with rapt attention, or asked questions which showed that he had indeed been thinking of these things since his last meeting with the trader, many years before.
In the course of his early wanderings Orpin managed to search out Ruyter the Hottentot robber, and so influenced him as to induce him to give up his lawless career, and return to the colony. Ruyter drew with him Abdul Jemalee, Booby the Bushman, and one or two others, who settled down to peaceful occupations.
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