Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/80

68 than half the population of the city had perished. The danger seemed to be passing away, leaving the missionary party untouched, when Mrs. Groves sickened, and within a week was dead. She was as saintly as her husband, and the story of her illness and death, as preserved in his journals, is one of the most affecting in the annals of missions. Illness visited every member of the family in turn. In August the baby died, and Groves would have been left with no European company except that of his two boys, had it not been for John Kitto, whom he had befriended many years before, and had finally brought with him to the East. This afflicted young man (he was stone-deaf) afterwards, with great help from his long Eastern experience, attained to eminence in the department of Biblical literature. He has left on record, in many an enthusiastic passage, the gratitude and reverence he felt towards his benefactor. “In the whole world,” he wrote at a later day, “so far as I know it, there is not one man whose character I venerate so highly.” It was some relief to his feelings to have the opportunity to act as tutor to the two boys.

The plague was followed by civil war, and Bagdad was besieged. The suffocating heat compelled Groves and his family to pass the night on the roof, notwithstanding that it was occasionally swept by the bullets of the besiegers.

Groves, though almost overwhelmed, held on his way, and his spirits revived when the friends from Aleppo joined him. A young Armenian, Serkies Davids, who had been bereaved of his last relative through the plague, Groves took into his own house and treated like a son. He became a convert,—the one indubitable convert of the mission,—and a thoroughly satisfactory one. But the work among the Mahometans remained