There was no Sunday; the man's wife and daughters were dancing before the house, while a black played the fiddle.
His instructions from the Directors were to go to Kuruman, remain there till Mr.Moffat should return from England, and turn his attention to the formation of a new station farther north, awaiting more specific instructions, He arrived at Kuruman on the 31st July, 1841, but no instructions had come from the Directors; his sphere of work was quite undetermined, and he began to entertain the idea of going to Abyssinia.
There could be no doubt that a Christian missionary was needed there, for the country had none; but if he should go, he felt that probably he would never return.

In writing of this to his friend Watt, he used words almost prophetic: "Whatever way my life may be spent so as but to promote the glory of our gracious God, I feel anxious to do it....

_My life, may be spent as profitably as a pioneer as in any other way_." In his next letter to the London Missionary Society, dated Kuruman, 23d September, 1841, he gives his impressions of the field, and unfolds an idea which took hold of him at the very beginning, and never lost its grip.

It was, that there was not population enough about the South to justify a concentration of missionary labor there, and that the policy of the Society ought to be one of expansion, moving out far and wide wherever there was an opening, and making the utmost possible use of native agency, in order to cultivate so wide a field.

In England he had thought that Kuruman might be made a great missionary institute, whence the beams of divine truth might diverge in every direction, through native agents supplied from among the converts; but since he came to the spot he had been obliged to abandon that notion; not that the Kuruman mission had not been successful, or that the attendance at public worship was small, but simply because the population was meagre, and seemed more likely to become smaller than larger.