A PRIEST’S DEVOTION

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 42, 4 November 1925, Page 57

A PRIEST’S DEVOTION

ON A LONG ERRAND OF MERCY. A story of fine devotion by a Catholic priest is told by a grateful mother la the Loudon Daily News of July 20. The priest ; travelled from England to a. lonely spot in Nigeria to bring home her injured son. Mr. W. C. A. Sexton, of Battersea, was sent last November to Joss, in Northern Nigeria, for the Bank of British West Africa. One evening in March die fell from a window and fractured his spine. The circumstances of the accident were mysterious, and it was thought by his friends there that the coffee he had just drunk had been drugged. Tie was taken to the European Hospital, but nothing could be done for him there, and finally his friends cabled his guardian, the Rev. Father Hackett, of Spanish Place, London, that he wanted to risk the journey home. hive weeks ago father Hackett set out for Nigeria, where the young man lay, bro-ken-backed and paralysed, and on Saturday the patient was lying safely in a London nursing home. “It must have been a terrible journey for both of them. Mrs. Sexton said to the Daily News. “I saw my son this morning, and although he is very ill indeed he stood the ordeal remarkably well.” Father Hackett has gone away to rest, but a friend told the Daily News something of the journey. “The patient travelled about 4000 miles on his lied,” he said. “Three days and nights were spent in jolting trains, partly in a little • tin-mine waggon running on a two-foot track. Every time the patient felt he could bear the jolting no longer, the train was stopped and he was given a rest. “At Lagos they embarked for Plymouth, and were at sea for a fortnight, during part of which Sexton had fever.” It will be some time before Mr. Sexton will have recovered sufficiently to undergo ‘an operation.