Visitors to Baviaans River were few. Before the Graaff-Reinet meeting, the missionary he most admired, the Revd John Brownlee, who had come to the frontier from Lanarkshire in 1817, visited Eildon from his mission station on the Gwali, a tributary of the Tyhume river, forty miles to the south-east. He made ‘many valuable suggestions in regard to measures for promoting the civilization of the Caffer tribes’, as did Wright both at Eildon and at Graaff-Reinet shortly after-wards. Even in his idealized portrait of Brownlee, ‘The Good Missionary’, dated ‘Cafferland 1825’ in Ephemerides, the battle lines are drawn. Brownlee had served as a very reluctant ‘government agent’ on the frontier, earned Somerset's disapproval and was supplanted in 1821 by the Revd W.R. Thomson. Just before the Graaff-Reinet meeting Dr Philip persuaded him to rejoin the London Missionary Society, from which he had resigned in 1818, before Philip's arrival. In ‘The Good Missionary’ Pringle wrote:

The sonnet was sent to Fairbairn for the Commercial Advertiser on 19 October 1825, a few days after its composition. Brownlee, Pringle felt, ‘had been vilely used by the Cape Govt. and not very well by some whom it and Dr Thom have recently set over him. I would like it indicted on this act.’ Like other material Pringle sent, Fairbairn did not publish ‘The Good Missionary’.

Another diversion was the wedding in June 1825 of Thomas's half-sister Catherine to his cousin (but not hers) John Brown Rennie, second son of the widow Rennie.