Margaret E. Burton Cvbrarp of Che theological ^eminarp PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY •a^D- PRESENTED BY Delavan L. Pierson CT 105 . B85 Burton, Margaret E. b. 1885. Comrades in service EDITED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA COMRADES IN SERVICE N. B. — Special helps and denominational mission study litera- ture for this course can be obtained by corresponding with the Secretary of your mission board or society. ■m&K COMRADES IN SERVICE BY / MARGARET E. BURTON NEW YORK MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA I 9 I 5 Copyright, 1915, by Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada CONTENTS PAGE ix PREFACE I A SERVANT OF THE CITY . Jacob A. Riis II A PILGRIM OF INDIA Chundra Lela . 25 III A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS . . . J. A. Burns 45 IV THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN . Kaji Yajima 61 V A MAN WITH A MESSAGE .... Dwight L. Moody • 79 VI A BELOVED PHYSICIAN .... Li Bi Cu . IOI VII A PACIFIC PIONEER Thomas Crosby . H 5 VIII A BISHOP OF THE NIGER .... Samuel Adjai Crowther . 131 IX A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK . . Frances Jackson Coppin . 149 X AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS . . . Syngman Rhee . 165 XI THE STORY OF A FRIEND .... Grace H. Dodge . 179 ILLUSTRATIONS Jacob A. Riis FACING PAGE . . I Chundra Lela • 25 Oh, Mother Ganges ! . . 28 J. A. Burns • 45 Alone in the Mountains .... . 56 Kaji Yajima 61 Dwight L. Moody . 79 Round Top . . 98 Li Bi Cu . IOI Thomas Crosby . . 115 Samuel Adjai Crowther .... . 131 Frances Jackson Coppin .... . 149 Syngman Rhee . 165 Political Prisoners . . 172 Greyston, Riverdale on the Hudson . 184 PREFACE “ What are you going to do with the gift of life ? ” We to whom this gift is still a new and untried thing are standing eager-eyed before this challenging ques- tion. What are we going to do with it ? A few of us perhaps are replying, “ I shall give my life to healing — or to teaching — or to farming — or to social service — or to business — or to the ministry — or to home-making.” Most of us, however, cannot yet answer so definitely. There are so many things which we must think about ; the kind of ability we have; the opportunities of train- ing that are ours ; the claims other people have a right to make on us ; the needs and opportunities in different kinds of work; and like factors. It may be many months and years before most of us can say just exactly what we are going to do in the years to come. But is there not, after all, an answer to this question which all of us can make even now ? “ What are you going to do with the gift of life? ” The “ Comrades in Service” of whom this book tells were very different from each other. They were of dif- ferent nations and different races; they lived in differ- ent lands and spoke different languages. Some of them were rich and some were desperately poor; some had every opportunity for education and some had almost IX X PREFACE none; some had social prominence and some were slaves; some were born into beautiful Christian homes and some were taught to worship idols. But as you become acquainted with these comrade-folk I think that you will find that they were all alike in the answer they made to that ringing challenge, “ What are you going to do with the gift of life? ” I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to the publishers who permitted the use of material from The Making of an American , by Jacob A. Riis; An Indian Priestess , by Mrs. Lee; Chundra Lela, by Z. F. Griffin; The Black Bishop , by Jesse Page; The Life of Dwight L . Moody, by his son; Up and Down the North Pacific Coast, by Thomas Crosby; and Reminiscences of School Life and Teaching, by Mrs. Coppin. Heart- iest thanks are also due to many personal friends and acquaintances of these “ Comrades in Service.” Miss Ruth Davis, the Rev. George Heber Jones, Mr. Sher- wood Eddy, Miss Josephine Piny on, and others have contributed much material without which several of these sketches would have been impossible. I am also deeply grateful to those subjects of sketches who are still living, who not only generously permitted me to write of them, but furnished me with information about themselves and their work. Margaret E. Burton. Chicago, Illinois, June 1, 1915. A SERVANT OF THE CITY I have lived in the best of times, when you do not have to dream things good, but can make them so. — Jacob A. Riis. JACOB A. RIIS Copyright, J. E. Purdy A SERVANT OF THE CITY Into the little tiled-roof house of a schoolmaster of the ancient town of Ribe, on the seacoast of Den- mark, there was born one day in 1849 a little boy who was named Jacob. His father wanted him to be- come a schoolmaster like himself, and one of this little Danish boy’s earliest memories was of being led, pro- testing, through the crooked cobble-stoned streets of Ribe to the schoolhouse. He evidently failed to make a good initial impression on the schoolmistress, for a large portion of that first day in school was spent in an empty hogshead, in whose capacious depths he formed a deep and undying hatred of school and all that pertained thereto. Ribe was a wonderful place for boys. There was splendid fishing in the river and fine places along the forget-me-not- fringed banks where one could build fires and roast fish and potatoes. Once there had been a great castle in Ribe, and the moat around the green castle hill was now filled with long rippling reeds, grow- ing higher than a boy’s head, and making a perfect jun- gle in which to hunt for tigers and grizzlies, and other wild beasts. Perhaps it was because he so loved the clean free sweep of meadow and ocean and river, and so gloried in the stories of the sturdy Norsemen of olden 2 COMRADES IN SERVICE days, that Jacob Riis so hated the one tenement of Ribe, which rejoiced in the appropriate name of Rags Hall. Its crowded, dirty, spiritless atmosphere was such a contrast to all his boyish soul admired that, when he was about twelve years old, he took his Christ- mas gift of a shining silver “mark” (worth about twenty-five cents) and, holding it before the astonished eyes of the poorest and most “ shiftless ” householder of Rags Hall, announced that he would present it to him on condition that he would clean up his house and his children. When Jacob was fourteen years old, he decided that he had had enough of school and would like to learn to be a carpenter. His father consented that he should serve a year’s apprenticeship to the best carpenter in Ribe, and then go to Copenhagen as an apprentice to a great builder. For four years Jacob worked in Copenhagen learning his trade, and then, having re- ceived his certificate as an enrolled carpenter of the guild of Copenhagen, went home to Ribe to ask Elisa- beth to be his wife. But Elisabeth said no, and with that answer all the light and laughter of life seemed blotted out for Jacob. He longed to go as far away from Denmark as possible and one May morning, with a curl of Elisabeth’s hair in a locket around his neck, and only a little more than enough money for a steer- age passage to America in his pocket, he set forth to try to forget his troubles in the life of a far-away country. He landed in New York after a long and stormy A SERVANT OF THE CITY 3 passage, and four days after his arrival joined a gang of men who were being sent to work at Brady’s Bend Iron Works on the Allegheny river. At Brady’s Bend he was put to work building huts for the miners, and very vigorously he went about his task in the effort to forget the terrible homesickness which at- tacked him every time he looked at the wooded hills which rose up on every side and seemed to him like prison walls shutting him away from the meadows of Denmark. One July morning, when Jacob was working in the carpenter shop as usual, some one brought the startling news that France had declared war on Prussia, and that Denmark was expected to join forces with her old ally. Five minutes after the Danish boy had heard the news he was in the company’s office, asking for his wages, and a few minutes later, having hurled his possessions into his trunk, he was running for the sta- tion, the trunk on his shoulder. The things which he had not been able to get into the trunk he sold for what he could get for them, and adding this sum to his wages was able to buy a ticket to Buffalo. He hoped that at Buffalo he would find Frenchmen who would be willing to help him get back to Europe to fight their enemy, but this was a vain hope, and he was forced to give his watch and his trunk and all its contents to a pawnbroker in order to get a ticket to New York. He reached New York with one cent in his pocket, but with high hopes of being sent at once to the front. There again, however, he was doomed to 4 COMRADES IN SERVICE bitter disappointment. The Danish consul registered his request to be sent to Denmark in case of war, but could do no more. The French did not seem to be fitting out any volunteer army, and no one was paying the passage of fighting men back to Europe. Riis pawned his revolver and his top-boots to pay his boarding-house bill, and then, having no money, set out for the country with all that he had left, a linen duster and a pair of socks, in a gripsack over his shoulder. He walked till about daylight, then curled up in a wagon and went to sleep. It was an unfortunate place to select for a nap, for the wagon proved to be a milk cart, whose irate driver hauled the sleeper out by his feet and dumped him into the gutter before starting on his early morning rounds. About noon, footsore and faint with hunger, for he had had no food since the day before, Riis wandered aimlessly into the open gates of Fordham College. He sat down to rest under a tree, so exhausted and famished that when a kindly monk asked him if he was hungry, he confessed that he was, although he says that he had no intention of making such an admission. The food gave him strength to go on and at night he found temporary work with a truck farmer. For several days Riis tramped through the country, doing odd jobs for his meals and sleeping in the fields at night, always trying to reach the sea in the hope of finding some way back to Denmark. Finally, his wanderings brought him back to New York where he A SERVANT OF THE CITY 5 pawned his boots for a dollar, fortified himself with a good dinner, and bought a ticket to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, with what was left. From Perth Amboy he walked for two days, sustained by two apples, and at sunset of the second day arrived at New Brunswick. He spent the night curled up on a brown- stone slab in the cemetery, and early the next morning was out looking for work. Finding nothing in New Brunswick, he went on to a town called “ Little Wash- ington,” where he succeeded in securing a job in a brickyard. Here he stayed for six weeks, until one day he heard that a volunteer company was ready to sail for France. That night he started for New York, arriving there just after the company had sailed. Re- peated appeals to the French consul were unavailing, and a plea to the captain of a French man-of-war in the harbor was equally so. Finally, however, it seemed as if his persistent efforts were to be rewarded. He succeeded in getting a job as stoker on a steamer which was due to sail for France in an hour. He ran all the way to Battery Place for his valise, and all the way back, arriving breathless just in time to see the steamer swing into the river beyond his reach. This was his last hope and he was again left penniless in New York. It was now late autumn, too late to get employment on farms or in brickyards. The city was full of idle men and Riis’s repeated efforts to find something to do were fruitless. Day after day he walked the streets trying to find work, and to forget the terrible hunger 6 COMRADES IN SERVICE which was his constant companion. Night after night he slept in the shelter of doorways or ash-bins, waked up time and again by the toe of a policeman’s boot and told to “ move on.” But he says : “ I was too proud in all my misery to beg. I do not believe I ever did. But I remember well a basement window at the downtown Delmonico’s, the silent appearance of my ravenous face at which, at a certain hour in the evening, always evoked a generous supply of meat-bones and rolls from a white-capped cook who spoke French. That was the saving clause. I accepted his rolls as instalments of the debt his country owed me, or ought to owe me, for my unavailing efforts in its behalf.” There was just one bright spot in Jacob Riis’s life during these dark days, the devotion of an adoring little black-and-tan, who had shared a doorway with him one cold night and had been the loyal companion of his miseries ever after. One terrible night of storm, Riis, drenched to the skin and unutterably wretched and hungry, with no prospect of shelter or food, was almost overcome by discouragement. Home and Elisabeth seemed hopelessly far away and unattainable and the dark river terribly near. Then the little dog pressed close against him for sympathy and banished the dread- ful sense of desolation. Taking him up in his arms, Riis tramped through the torrents of rain to the police station and applied for shelter. The sergeant saw the drenched little dog under the tatters of Riis’s ragged coat, and ordered him to put it outside. There was nothing else to do — to stay in the streets through such a A SERVANT OF THE CITY 7 night was to perish — and most reluctantly Riis left his little friend curled up in a ball on the steps, waiting for him. The police station was terribly crowded with the worst type of tramps, but Riis was utterly exhausted and soon fell asleep. He woke up long before morn- ing, put his hand to his throat, and found that some one had cut the string around his neck and stolen the gold locket in which he had kept the little shining curl which he felt to be his last link with home. Heart- broken, he rushed to the sergeant with his story, only to be called a thief, accused of having stolen the locket, and threatened with imprisonment. It was too much, coming after days and nights of suffering, and all the bitterness in his heart poured itself out in angry words. He never remembered what he said, but he remembered that the sergeant ordered the doorman to put him out, and that the little dog, seeing the door- man lay unfriendly hands upon his beloved friend, sprang at him and buried his teeth in his leg. The doorman caught the little beast by its legs and beat out its brains against the stone steps, and Jacob Riis, mad with such rage as he had never before imagined, snatched up paving-stones from the gutter and hurled them at the police station until the frightened ser- geant ordered two policemen to disarm him and take him out of the district. They left him at the nearest ferry, and he gave the ferryman his silk handkerchief to take him to Jersey City. For four days he walked along the railroad tracks, living on apples and an occa- 8 COMRADES IN SERVICE sional meal earned by odd jobs, and sleeping in empty barns at night. When he reached Philadelphia he found friends in need, in the Danish consul and his wife, who gave him a two weeks’ rest in their home and then sent him to friends in Jamestown. The following winter Riis spent in Dexterville, not far from Jamestown, felling trees and trapping musk- rats. It was during this winter that he first made his appearance upon the lecture platform. There was a so- ciety of Scandinavian workingmen in Jamestown who had had little opportunity for education, to whom Riis undertook to lecture twice a week on astronomy and geology. For several weeks he held his audience spell- bound by his learned discourses on the formation and development of the earth, illustrated freely with im- promptu drawings of saurians, the ichthyosauri, and other prehistoric beasts. But when he attempted to explain latitude and longitude, his audience lost confi- dence in him. After he had struggled for some time to make the matter clear, an old sea-captain arose in the body of the house and declared that a man who could not explain so simple a thing as that evidently knew nothing whatever. The audience at once took the old captain’s word for it and departed in a body, convinced that none of the amazing tales which they had been hearing were worthy of credence on the part of sensible men. In the spring Riis walked from Dexterville to West- field, and in Westfield worked for a doctor for a month, earning enough money to take the train to Buf- A SERVANT OF THE CITY 9 falo and begin life there with a few extra dollars in his pocket. At Buffalo he worked for a time in a lumber- yard, but lost his position before long by taking the part of some newly arrived German laborers who were being abused by a tyrannical foreman. He then went to work in a cabinet factory. It was while working in this factory that he first tried his hand at teaching. One of his fellow workmen was an elderly Dane, who had worked so hard in childhood that he had never had time for the rudiments of education. Riis under- took to make up this lack, and night after night the older man came to Riis’s little bedroom and by the light of the little lamp soon learned to read and write the language of his adopted country. After several months of varied experiences in Buf- falo Riis accepted an invitation to be a traveling sales- man for a firm of his countrymen who had started a cooperative furniture factory in Jamestown. His efforts in this line were successful enough to encourage him to become an agent for a “ patent flat and fluting iron,” in the interests of which he canvassed several of the states of the Union, until a fever laid him low in Franklin, Pennsylvania. When at last he was well enough to travel, he started for New York, walking all the way and earning just enough by the sale of his irons to pay for food and lodging. It was spring when he started from Franklin, but the leaves along the Hud- son were aflame with gold and scarlet before he finally reached New York. He spent his last twenty dollars for a course in 10 COMRADES IN SERVICE telegraphy at a business college in New York, and then answered an advertisement for a “ city editor ” in a Long Island weekly paper. He filled this position for two weeks, and having by that time received con- clusive proof that the editor was exceedingly “ bad pay,” went back to New York no richer than when he had come except for Bob, a Newfoundland puppy which some one had given him. His next occupation was the peddling of an illus- trated edition of Hard Times. Long afterward he declared that no amount of good fortune could ever turn his head as long as that book stood on his shelves. He and Bob were a living illustration of “ hard times,” for they were earning barely enough to keep them alive. Bob fared better than his master, for he was able to coax many a meal from the kitchen doors of the houses they visited, but Riis was almost always hungry. Things went from bad to worse. One day the two had only a crust to eat between them, and the next morning set out faint with hunger, with- out a cent for food for the day or shelter at night. All day long they went from house to house without making a single sale. Bob’s most persuasive tail- waggings and his master’s most eloquent praises of Dickens had failed to provide breakfast, dinner, sup- per, or money for a night’s lodging. Without a cent in his pocket Jacob Riis sank down at night on the steps of Cooper Institute utterly exhausted and dis- couraged. His dismal reflections were suddenly inter- rupted by the question, “ Why, what are you doing A SERVANT OF THE CITY ii here ? ” and looking up he saw the principal of the busi- ness college which he had attended when he first came back to New York. “ Books ! ” snorted this gentleman in response to Riis’s answer, “ I guess they won’t make you rich. Now, how would you like to be a re- porter, if you have got nothing better to do? The manager of a news agency downtown asked me to-day to find him a bright young fellow whom he could break in. It isn’t much— ten dollars a week to start with. But it is better than peddling books, I know. . . . Hard Times. . . . I guess so. What do you say ? I think you will do. Better come along and let me give you a note to him now.” To be a reporter had been Riis’s dream for many a month, and he could hardly believe that such an op- portunity had really come to him. All through the night he and Bob walked up and down Broadway, thinking. “ What had happened had stirred me pro- foundly,” he wrote many years later. “ For the sec- ond time I saw a hand held out to save me from wreck just when it seemed inevitable, and I knew it for his hand to whose will I was at last beginning to bow in humility that had been a stranger to me before. It had ever been my own will, my own way, upon which I insisted. In the shadow of Grace Church I bowed my head against the granite wall of the gray tower, and prayed for strength to do the work which I had so long and arduously sought and which had now come to me; the while Bob sat and looked on, saying clearly enough with his wagging tail that he did not know 12 COMRADES IN SERVICE what was going on, but that he was sure it was all right.” The next morning Jacob Riis presented himself for duty at the New York News Association, and was assigned to report a luncheon in the Astor House. In the midst of such savory food as he had not seen or smelled in many a day, he wrote his report, and won from the editor a brief, “ You’ll do! Take that desk and report at ten every morning sharp.” Then, having had no food for three days, he fell in a swoon on his way up the stairs of a Danish boarding-house, and lay there until some one stumbled against him in the dark and carried him in. All through the autumn and winter Riis worked with the news agency, beginning his day promptly at ten in the morning and seldom reaching home until one or two in the morning of the next day. In the spring a group of politicians in Brooklyn, who had started a weekly newspaper, asked him to be their reporter, and two weeks after he had joined them made him editor of the paper. When the paper had served its purpose by helping its owners to win in the fall elections, they decided to give it up, but at Riis’s earnest entreaty finally consented to sell it to him for the small sum which he could pay down, and his notes for future payments. For the next year Riis was edi- tor, reporter, publisher, and advertising agent of a big four-page weekly, and by an almost incredible amount of work became its sole owner by June. The day on which he made his last payment was Elisabeth’s A SERVANT OF THE CITY 13 birthday, and that night he sent a letter addressed to her speeding on its way to Denmark. It was while he was editing the News that he be- came powerfully stirred by the preaching of the Rev. Ichabod Simmons, and definitely consecrated him- self to the service of God and his fellows. With characteristic whole-heartedness he decided to give up his editorial work and become a minister, but was re- strained by Mr. Simmons, who showed him that the world had need of “ consecrated pens ” as well as con- secrated tongues. “ Then and there I consecrated mine/’ says Mr. Riis. The News was promptly dedi- cated to the cause of reform, regardless of the conse- quent unpopularity of its owner. Into the midst of these busy days, there came one early winter afternoon a letter half covered with for- eign stamps. Elisabeth did not know how many stamps it took to carry a letter from Denmark to America, and because she was afraid to ask anybody about it, she put on three times as many as were required. When he had taken the letter up to his own little room and finally summoned the courage to read it, the face of the world changed for Jacob Riis. “ I knelt down,” he says, “ and prayed long and fervently that I might strive with all my might to deserve the great happiness that had come to me.” The doctor had ordered a rest and change, the newspaper could be sold for five times what had been paid for it, and there was nothing to prevent the prospective bridegroom from going home to claim Elisabeth almost immedi- 14 COMRADES IN SERVICE ately. In a very few weeks in the old Domkirke of Ribe he and the Elisabeth of his dreams were made man and wife. Soon after Jacob Riis returned to America with his wife he was offered a position as reporter on the New York Tribune. For six months he worked hard for a salary so small that he was forced to draw on his little bank account to make both ends meet. Then one night when he had been uptown on a late assign- ment, and was running at full speed through a blinding snowstorm to get his report in before the paper went to press, he collided with the city editor of the Tribune so violently as to throw him off his feet into a snow- drift. The irate remarks which issued from the drift convinced Riis that his days with the Tribune were numbered, and he waited in despair for the victim’s recognition of his assailant. But the city editor’s curiosity as to the cause of Riis’s mad haste seemed more pronounced than his wrath. “ Do you always run like that when you are out on assignments ? ” he inquired, after listening to Riis’s explanation. “ When it is late like this — yes,” Riis answered. “ How else would I get my copy in?” “Well,” was the editor’s comment, “ just take a reef when you round the corner. Don’t run your city editor down again.” The next morning Riis went to the office with a sinking heart. He had not been there long before he was summoned to the city editor’s desk, and the first words he heard seemed to confirm his worst fore- bodings. A SERVANT OF THE CITY 15 “ Mr. Riis,” the editor began stiffly, “ you knocked me down last night without cause.” “ Yes, sir ! But I ” Riis interrupted. “ Into a snowdrift,” the editor continued. “ Nice thing for a reporter to do to his commanding officer. Now, sir! this' will not do. We must find some way of preventing it in the future. Our man at Police Headquarters has left. I am going to send you up there in his place. You can run there all you want to, and you will want to all you can. It is a place that needs a man who will run to get his copy in and tell the truth and stick to it. You will find plenty of fighting there. But don’t go knocking people down — unless you have to.” Riis went out from the editor’s office and did two things. He telegraphed his wife, “ Got staff appoint- ment. Police Headquarters. $25 a week. Hur- rah.” And facing what he knew to be the most diffi- cult position on the paper, remembering how hard had been the fight his predecessor had had to wage, he com- mended his work and himself to the God who gives victory, and took hold ! Both actions were characteris- tic. Prayer in the midst of his tasks was as natural to Riis as breathing, for he regarded his work as a reporter as a God-given opportunity. “ The reporter who is behind the scenes,” he once said, “ sees the tumult of passions, and not rarely a human heroism that redeems all the rest. It is his task so to portray it that we can see all its meaning, or at all events catch the human drift of it, not merely the i6 COMRADES IN SERVICE foulness and the reek of blood. If he can do that he has performed a signal service, and his murder story- may easily come to speak more eloquently to the minds of thousands than the sermon preached to a hundred in the church on Sunday.” With such a conception as this of the opportunity of his work, prayer in the midst of it all was inevitable. “ My supplications,” he said, “ ordinarily take the form of putting the case plainly to him who is the source of all right and justice, and leaving it so.” The first years of work at the Mulberry Street police quarters were years of constant fight for Jacob Riis. “ Somebody was always fighting somebody else for some fancied injury or act of bad faith in the gath- ering of the news,” he says, and upon the arrival of the new reporter from the Tribune all made common cause against him. The record of his working hours tells of ceaseless strenuous struggle to get for his paper the news which rival reporters and the police were determined he should not get. But the greatest fight of all those fighting years, says Jacob Riis, was with himself. His blood had never ceased to boil at the memory of that night of pouring rain when at the door of the police station his loyal little dog friend had been killed before his eyes. And now that he had a recognized place at the police headquarters, and the backing of the Tribune, nothing would have been easier than to go to the records of the Church Street Police Station, find out the name of the cruel sergeant and de- mand his punishment. Time after time he went to the A SERVANT OF THE CITY 1 7 station to begin his search in the record books, and again and again he turned away, until one day, as he held in his hand the very book which would have given him the sergeant’s name, he thought of a plan of re- venge which his heart could approve. He would destroy, not the sergeant, but the system of police lodging-houses of which the sergeant had been only an instrument. With the record book in his hands, he vowed that if God gave him strength he would fight the unutterably filthy police lodging-houses, where hard- ened tramps and impressionable penniless boys, such as he had been, were herded together in utter wretched- ness, until not a lodging-house was left. He set the book down unopened, his fight with himself over, his long fight with those breeders of physical and moral disease begun. It was a long fight and a slow one, and many a time Jacob Riis kept up his courage only by going out and watching a stone-cutter hammer away at his stone one hundred times without so much as a crack appearing, until finally at the one hundred and first blow the rock would split in two. Riis never lost a chance to strike a blow. He felt sure that if the people of New York understood the evils of the police lodging-houses they would never tolerate them, and he told the truth in no uncertain terms through the columns of newspaper after newspaper, by pictures, by lantern slides, by re- ports to committees and boards, until finally, more than fourteen years after the fight was started, when Mr. Roosevelt was commissioner of police, the doors of the i8 COMRADES IN SERVICE police lodging-rooms were closed forever, and the murder of the little dog was avenged ! Another fight of the first years as police reporter on the Tribune was with Mulberry Bend, a slum district filled with tenements far more congested and dan- gerous than the Rags Hall which had so displeased the twelve-year-old schoolboy. Mulberry Bend was a center of both disease and crime, and Jacob Riis at- tacked it single-handed. Article after article he wrote, making apparently little or no impression, but never giving up. Then one day his morning newspaper contained a four-line item telling of the discovery of a method of taking pictures by flashlight. Riis was sure that if he could make people see the Bend at night as he had seen it, he could rouse them to action, and straightway investigated the matter of flashlights. Within two weeks he was invading Mulberry Bend night after night, armed with flashlight cartridges, which in those days were shot from a revolver, and which were more than terrifying to the startled in- habitants of the Bend. Little by little Riis won his fight, and was rewarded for the long hours of volun- tary night work, on top of busy days, by seeing the tenement-houses of the Bend condemned by the Sani- tary Board, and a park and playground established on the place where they had been. The fight for the destruction of Mulberry Bend was only the beginning of Jacob Riis’ fight with the slum and the tenement-house, which lasted as long as life lasted. Day after day he put the facts before the A SERVANT OF THE CITY 19 people of New York City through the columns of his newspaper. Many a night found him in church or lecture hall showing the stereoptican slides which he had had made from his photographs, that both the eyes and ears of the people of that great city might know “ how the other half lives.” One night an editor of Scribner's Magazine heard him lecture and asked him to write an article for the magazine. When the magazine article came out, a firm of publishers asked him to elaborate it into a book, and night after night he came home from his office and wrote How the Other Half Lives, while the rest of the family slept. How desper- ately tired he grew probably no one knows but himself, and even he hardly realized it until one evening in Boston, he went to call on a friend and found, when he tried to give the maid his name, that he had no idea what it was. But he felt repaid for all the hard work when his book came out and thousands of people all over the country were reading How the Other Half Lives and learning how to help. This was the first of many books which Jacob Riis wrote to tell the story of the needs of the poor and the way to meet those needs. Children of the Tenements, The Battle with the Slums, Out of Mulberry Street are only a few of them. Always, too, he was helping in other ways. One year he gave all the time and effort he could spare as general agent of the Council of Confederated Good Government Clubs. “ We tore down unfit tenements, forced the opening 20 COMRADES IN SERVICE of parks and playgrounds, the establishment of a truant school system, the demolition of the over- crowded old Tombs and the erection on its site of a decent new prison. We overhauled the civil courts and made them over new in the charter of the Greater New York. We lighted dark halls; closed the ‘ cruller ’ bakeries in tenement-house cellars that had caused the loss of no end of lives, for the crullers were boiled in fat in the early morning hours while the tenants slept, and when the fat was spilled in the fire their peril was awful. We fought the cable-car managers at home and the opponents of a truant school at Albany. We backed up Roosevelt in his fight in the Police Board and — well, I shall never get time to tell it all. But it was a great year! ” he summarizes. This might be a summary not simply of that one year’s work, but of all the later years of his life, for the destruction of the tenements and the establishment of an adequate number of good public schools, truant schools, and playgrounds, were causes to which he gave his strength without reserve. Jacob Riis was not the kind of man to care greatly for recognition of his work. It was enough for him that the work was done. A great many honors of dif- ferent kinds came to him, many of them nominations to honorary membership in various societies in Amer- ica and Europe. Most of them he declined, stuffing the letters which offered them into a pigeonhole labeled tersely with one of Eugene Field’s verses, descriptive of “ Clow’s Noble Yellow Pup ” : A SERVANT OF THE CITY 21 “ Him all that goodly company Did as deliverer hail; They tied a ribbon round his neck, Another round his tail.*’ There was one honor, however, which he could not ( refuse, fragrant as it was, with memories of flowers and fields and little children. When the meadows around his house in Richmond Hill were radiant with ;• the gold and white of buttercups and daisies, and ! sweet with the scent of clover blossoms, his small sons and daughters used to bring him great armfuls of blos- soms and beg him to take them to “ the poors ” in the hot city. But no matter how laden he was when he started from home, he never had a single flower five minutes after he had left the ferry, for wistful little faces sprang up on every side, wild with eagerness for just one of the joy-bringing blossoms. The sight of those for whom there were no posies left, who sat down on the curbstone and dug grimy fists into eyes brimming over with tears, went straight to the heart of Jacob Riis, and one June morning he published an appeal for flowers in the newspapers, offering to dis- pose of any that were sent to his office. “ Flowers came pouring in from every corner of the compass. They came in boxes, in barrels, and in bunches, from field and garden, from town and coun- try. Express wagons carrying flowers jammed Mul- berry Street and the police came out to marvel at the row. The office was fairly smothered in fragrance. A howling mob of children besieged it. The reporters 22 COMRADES IN SERVICE forgot their rivalry and lent a hand with enthusiasm in giving out the flowers. The Superintendent of Police detailed five stout patrolmen to help carry the abundance to points of convenient distribution. Wherever he went, fretful babies stopped crying and smiled as the messengers of love were laid against their wan cheeks. Slovenly women curtsied and made way. . . . The Italians in the Barracks stopped quarreling to help keep order. The worst street became suddenly good and neighborly.” The slum’s hungry love for the beautiful was a revelation even to Jacob Riis. Taking flowers there was, he said, “ like cutting windows for souls.” Al- though he saw that the ministry of the flowers had assumed proportions far beyond his ability to handle, he knew that somehow, somewhere, the work must be taken care of, for the slums must not starve for want of the fragrance and joyous color which willing hands were ready to pour in so lavishly. Some of the boxes of flowers had the initials I. H. N. on them, and when Jacob Riis learned that they stood for “ In His Name,” the words which were the motto of the King’s Daugh- ters’ Society, he thought he knew to whom to entrust the flowers. The members of the society gladly under- took the work, but the needs they saw as they took the flowers from house to house were too great and com- pelling to allow them to turn away when summer and flowers had gone, and to-day there stands in Henry Street a beautiful settlement house maintained by the King’s Daughters’ Society. What wonder that when A SERVANT OF THE CITY 23 on Jacob Riis’s silver wedding day they asked him to let this settlement house bear his name, he could not say them nay. “ I have lived in the best of times,” said Jacob Riis, “ when you do not have to dream things good, but can make them so.” Probably no one has ever known bet- ter than he what joy it is to “ make them so,” nor could say more heartily than he, when working days were nearing their close, “ I have been very happy. No man ever had so good a time.” A PILGRIM OF INDIA All this I endured just to find God. — Chundra Lela. CHUNDRA LELA A PILGRIM OF INDIA About eighty years ago, in the city of Kaski, up on the northern border of India, among the Himalaya mountains, a great celebration was taking place. There was a long procession of gaily decorated ele- phants, and a sumptuous feast, lasting several days, to which people came from all over the state of Nepal, in which Kaski is located. All this was because a little girl, seven years old, the daughter of a prominent Brahman priest of Kaski, was being married to the son of another wealthy Brahman. Because she was such a little girl, it was decided that she should not at once go to her husband’s home, but continue to live in her father’s house. And because her father was a very learned man, and had plenty of leisure time, he taught little Chundra Lela to read and write, although it was not then the custom in India to give girls any education whatever. But one day, when Chundra Lela was nine years old, word came to her home which caused lamenta- tions as great as the happiness which her wedding had brought two years before. For her husband was dead and she was a widow r , the most despised of all creatures in India. Hinduism teaches that the death of a husband is caused by some sin which his wife 25 26 COMRADES IN SERVICE has committed, perhaps in some previous existence, and as long as she lives she is an outcast, scorned and ill treated by every one. For the first year after her husband’s death she is allowed to have only one meal a day, and twice a month she must fast for an entire day and night without even a drop of water, although the heat of India is terrible. Her hair, which is the pride of a woman of India, is cut off and her head is shaved; she may wear only the coarsest clothing and no ornaments; and is never allowed to go to any celebrations or appear at any social gatherings, be- cause her presence is supposed to bring bad luck. She is never allowed to marry again, but all her life is wholly at the mercy of other people, being often the drudge and slave of her husband’s family. Because little girls are married so early in India, and because a child is considered a widow if the man or boy to whom she is betrothed dies even if she is not yet married, one woman in every six in that great country is a widow. There are 1 12,000 widows less than ten years old, and 18,000 less than five. It was a great host into whose membership nine-year-old Chundra Lela entered. When she was twelve years old her father took her with him on a pilgrimage to the sacred shrine of Juggernaut, many hundreds of miles away in the east- ern part of India. The hardships of so long a jour- ney in a climate like that of India are very great, and were much greater at that time than now, for there were no trains to carry the pilgrims, and the long miles must be covered on foot or in the bullock A PILGRIM OF INDIA 27 carts or in palanquins. Hundreds of pilgrims died every year as a result of the difficulties of the journey, and Chundra Lela’s father was among those who never returned to his home. Just before he died he called his daughter to him and gave her a bunch of keys. He told her that if, when she reached home, she would open the boxes to which they belonged, she would find the gold which she had inherited from her husband. During the next year Chundra Lela spent much time in studying the sacred books which her father had taught her to read, and at the end of the year she had arrived at a momentous decision. “ In my study of the sacred books of the Hindus,” she says, “ and especially Bhagavad Gita > I had found that salvation is promised to those who visit and worship at all the holy places, and if one would pay careful attention to all such matters he would get a vision of God in this world. I decided that a vision of God and forgiveness of sins would be worth more to me than anything else.” Accordingly this little girl, barely fourteen years old, decided that she would go on a pilgrimage to the four greatest Hindu shrines, one at the extreme east of India, one at the western boundary, one far in the south, and another as far to the north in the heights of the Himalaya mountains. To visit these four shrines meant a journey covering a distance as great as that from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean and back again, and as Chundra Lela must walk almost all the way, it would take her many years to do this. But her 2 8 COMRADES IN SERVICE heart yearned for the assurance that she had re- ceived forgiveness for the unknown sin which she supposed had caused her husband’s death, and for the promised vision of God; and she counted no difficulties or hardships too great a cost to pay to secure these blessings. Chundra Lela was sure that if her brothers or her stepmother knew what she was planning to do they would not permit her to go, so she did not tell any one of her plans, except two other widows in the household who had for a long time been thinking of going on this pilgrimage but had not been able to do so for lack of money. They gladly agreed to go with Chundra Lela, and at three o’clock one morning, be- fore any one else was astir, the three stole out of the house, each with a long narrow bag around her waist, filled with the gold coins which Chundra Lela had found in the boxes to which her father had given her the keys. As they traveled, Chundra Lela counted her sacred beads over and over, and repeated incantation after incantation which she had learned from the sacred books. At every sacred river she stopped and bathed, in the hope of washing away her sins, and she wor- shiped at each shrine she passed, making offerings be- fore the idols and giving presents to the priests. At Monghyr, where there is a shrine to the goddess Sita, it is a part of the worship to pour very hot water over the unprotected body, and this Chundra Lela did, unflinchingly. At Calcutta she bathed in the sacred OH, MOTHER GANGES! One day’s ablution frees from all sin ! A PILGRIM OF INDIA 29 river Ganges, and at Gaya, where there are forty-five holy places, she visited them all, giving a present to the priest in charge of each of them. And finally she and her companions reached the great temple of Jug- gernaut at Puri, on the eastern border of India. This temple is one of the most magnificent in India, and the ground for eighty miles around is called holy. In this temple is one of the ugliest of all the 315,000,000 gods of Hinduism, Juggernaut. He has only a stump of a body, no legs, only parts of arms, and huge head, eyes, and mouth. Hosts of pilgrims from all over India try to be in Puri at the time of 1 the annual Juggernaut festival, but many of them die 1 of starvation and hardship on the journey. At the i time of the festival the idol is taken out of the temple : and put in an enormous car, built in the form of a tower, to which are attached immense ropes, very long and heavy. Hundreds, even thousands of people take hold of the ropes and pull the car through the streets, though it is so heavy that it sometimes takes hours to get it started. Every pilgrim tries frantically to get hold of a rope, and those who cannot often throw themselves in front of the car, or prostrate themselves in the mud beside it in their religious frenzy. Here Chundra Lela spent two weeks, performing all the sacred rites of worship, and giving generously to the temple and the priests. But she did not receive the vision of God for which she had prayed, nor did her earnest worship of the ugly idol bring her a sense 30 COMRADES IN SERVICE of pardon. So she and her companions set forth again, to walk the thousand long, hot miles which lay between them and the great shrine of southern India, on the island of Ramesvaram, not far from Ceylon. The god worshiped in this temple is Ram, one of the favorite gods of Hinduism, the story of whose adventurous and exciting life is told in the Ramayana, one of the sacred books of the Hindus. Months had lengthened into years before Chundra Lela and her companions arrived at Ramesvaram, but they finally reached the temple and spent ten days in worship there. Here again, as at Juggernaut, Chundra Lela gave a great feast to the priests, and presented them with a cow to supply them with milk. But here again she found no peace, and she and her friends set out for another jour- ney of a thousand miles to Dwaraca, the great temple at the extreme west of India. The Hindus believe that the temple here was raised by a miracle in a single night. It is sacred to the god Krishna, the story of whose impure and vicious deeds is not fit to be read. But millions of pilgrims visit this temple, for it is written of it, “ Whoever visits that holy shrine, the place where Krishna pursued his sports, is liberated from all sin.” Here Chundra Lela spent fifteen days, painting her body with sandalwood, worshiping the idol, and giving lavish gifts to the priests and holy men. The next stage of her journey was perhaps the hardest of all, for the fourth great temple is on Mount Badrinath, one of the great mountains of the Himalaya A PILGRIM OF INDIA 3i range. The temple is 10,400 feet above sea-level, and before the feet of the pilgrims have gone far up the mountain path they are numb with cold and cut by jagged ice. Chundra Lela and her companions wrapped their bleeding feet in layer after layer of cloth, and went on determinedly, though they were soon suffering intensely with the cold. The last part of the way lies along so steep and dangerous a path that the climb was made only by clinging to rocks and ice, and these weary pilgrims seemed almost more dead than alive when at last they reached the temple. But their hearts were hopeful, for this was the end of their pilgrimage, and surely they would now receive the promised assurance of forgiveness, surely they would find the God for whom they had so long and so ear- nestly sought ! Three days they stayed in the intense cold, and then began the hard journey down the moun- tain. Chundra Lela’s heart was very heavy, for the four shrines had all been visited, and the peace and sense of fellowship with God, to gain which she had left her home seven years before, had not come. But she refused to give up. Weary and exhausted though she was she climbed Mount Kedarnath, another mountain of the Himalayas, on which there is a noted temple, and sprinkled the idol with water from the sacred Ganges river, which she had brought with her. She bathed in the Ganges where it comes out from the mountainside at Hardwar, and again at Allahabad, where it joins another sacred river, the Jumna. She cast her gift of flowers upon it at Benares, and made 32 COMRADES IN SERVICE offerings at the many shrines in that sacred city, and gave generous gifts to the priests at Ranigung, the place celebrated as the birthplace of the god Ram. On her way to Ranigung one of her companions developed a fever, and in spite of all that was done for her died within three days. At Ranigung the other was smitten with cholera and died. Then Chundra Lela’s heart was heavy indeed. She says: “ I had visited the four great places sacred to the Hindus, a great many of the smaller places, and had expended much money, but all in vain. I had received no manifestation nor any evidence that the Supreme Being, or any lesser god, was pleased with my worship. My two faithful friends were gone, and I was alone in the world. ... In my distress I knew not what to do.” While she was wondering where to go next, she met a company of pilgrims on their way to the tem- ple of Juggernaut. Being alone and having no plan, she decided to go with them, although they warned her that their path lay through a thick forest, and they must experience much suffering before arriving at their destination. Chundra Lela, however, decided to cast in her lot with theirs. Now that her two com- panions were gone, she did her own cooking and car- ried her water for the first time in her life. The com- pany of pilgrims received many gifts of food from the people of the villages through which they passed, but Chundra Lela was too independent to accept any of these gifts, although she had made so many offer- A PILGRIM OF INDIA 33 ings before the idols and to the priests and had sup- ported herself and her companions for so many years that her supply of gold pieces was almost gone. One day, when the company of pilgrims was resting not far from Midnapur, the king, whose palace was near, sent his servants with gifts of food for them. Chun- dra Lela declined these gifts, to the astonishment of the servant, who told the king on his return that all had accepted the rice and ghee (melted butter), except one woman who sat reading her sacred books. The king was interested in this account of a woman who could read the sacred books, and sent for her to come to his palace. Chundra Lela accepted this invitation, and was graciously received by the queen and her maids of honor. When they asked her where she had come from and why she had declined to eat the food the king had sent, she answered: “ My home is in Nepal, and my father was the family priest to the king of Nepal. I pay my own way and buy my own food.” When they asked why she had come so far from her home, she told them : “ I am trying to find God, and deliverance from sin.” The king and queen begged her to remain with them as their priestess, and she consented to do so, giving her time for the next few years to teaching Sanskrit to the women of the palace and reading the sacred books to them. The king built a house for her, gave her servants of her own, and showered every kind- ness upon her. But she was restless, for she had not 34 COMRADES IN SERVICE yet satisfied the longing of her heart, and after a few years of quiet she set out on her journeying again. Not long after she had left the palace she met a woman who was an ascetic or fakir, who offered to teach her how to torture herself in such ways as to please the gods. " I thought in my mind,” says Chundra Lela, “ that if there was any virtue in these rites, surely I would find God.” The story of the tortures she inflicted upon herself during the next years would be hard to believe if there were not many such stories of devout men and women of India who have sought by the most terrible bodily suffering to win the favor of the gods. A mis- sionary tells of one place in which many of these fakirs were gathered together. “ Each selected his own mode of penance, or self- torture,” she writes. “ Some were lying on beds of spikes; others buried in the sand; still others lying over smoking wood; some had held their arms in an upright position until the flesh had withered and dried on the bone, and the unkempt finger-nails had grown several inches in length, piercing through the flesh and winding about the shriveled and distorted hand.” Chundra Lela vowed that all during the six most scorchingly hot months of India’s hot year, she would sit all day and every day in the burning sun, with five fires built close around her. From midnight until daylight each night she stood in front of an idol, standing on one foot, with the other drawn up against A PILGRIM OF INDIA 35 it, imploring the god to reveal himself to her. In the cooler months, instead of this, she spent the night sitting in a pond of water, up to her neck, counting over her sacred beads. Years afterward she told a friend : “ Nobody knows how long those nights were, nor how I suffered before morning. The string contained one hundred and eight beads. With each bead I called on the name of a god; with the other hand I kept account of the number of times I had gone around the string. . . . In a night I would go round the string one thousand times, repeating the name of the gods one hundred and eight thousand times. I would look toward the East for the first ray of light, and wonder if the night would ever end. When day broke I would crawl out of the water as best I could with my be- numbed limbs, and prostrating my body on the ground, would then measure my length to the spot where I was to sit all day, worshiping idols. . . . Thus I called upon Ram day and night, with no re- sponse. All this I endured just to find God.” As she worshiped she says she used to plead with the idol, “ If thou art God, reveal thyself to me ! Reach forth and take the offering I bring. Let me see, hear, or feel something by which I may know I have pleased thee, and that my great sin is pardoned, and I am accepted by thee ! ” But no sense of peace came, and at the end of three years of this self-inflicted suffering she felt that she had done all that she possibly could. 36 COMRADES IN SERVICE “ I have done and suffered all that could be re- quired of mortal, by god or man, and yet without avail/’ she declared. She returned to Midnapur, and for a time sup- ported herself by teaching the sacred books to the women of several prominent families there. She her- self, however, had now lost all faith in Hinduism, and one day gathered up her idols and gave them to a woman of low caste, saying: “ You may worship these if you like; I have done them homage many long weary years — all in vain. I will never worship them again! There is nothing in Hinduism or I would have found it.” One day when she went to visit a friend she found her reading some Christian books. This was the first time that Chundra Lela had seen any Christian litera- ture, and when she learned that an American teacher had given her friend the books she asked if she might come and meet the teacher at the lesson time the fol- lowing day. The American teacher, who was Miss Julia Phillips of the American Free Baptist Mission, was unable to come the next day, but the Bible woman who came in her place was so much impressed by Chundra Lela that, when she went back to the mis- sion and told about her, Miss Phillips decided to go to see her at once. From Miss Phillips, Chundra Lela heard the Christian story for the first time, and from her she received the first Bible she had ever seen. Day and night Chundra Lela studied this Bible, and when her pupils came to her to hear her read the books A PILGRIM OF INDIA 37 of Hinduism, she read to them from the Bible in- stead. “ This new book is a good book,” she told them, and they agreed with her, but their husbands be- came alarmed and threatened Chundra Lela. “ If you become a Christian,” they told her, “ we will all turn you out, and people will call you mad and beat and stone you ! ” But Chundra Lela refused to be intimidated. “ I am not afraid,” she answered. “ You people cannot hold me, and need not try. You yourselves ought to become Christians.” And then she would begin to explain the gospel story. After she had been studying her Bible for about two months, she went to the missionaries and told them that she wanted to take her stand as a Chris- tian. Dr. J. L. Phillips asked her : “ You say you have worshiped all these idols; have you got pardon for your sin ? ” “ I have worshiped every idol I know,” Chundra Lela answered. “ I have gone on all pilgrimages and done all the Hindu religion has taught; but I know nothing about pardon, and have had no peace.” “ Cannot your idols forgive sins ? ” Dr. Phillips asked again. “ If not, how will you get pardon? ” “ I have now read about Jesus,” Chundra Lela told him joyously, “ and learn that he is the Savior and can save and pardon me. Believing this, I wish to be- come a Christian.” The next day Chundra Lela attended a Christian 38 COMRADES IN SERVICE church service for the first time, and heard her first sermon from the lips of Dr. Phillips. “ Oh, what a sermon ! ” she exclaimed. “ While I sat listening my heart was stirred within me, and I felt that I had found that for which I had long sought. I wished to leave Hinduism and all its cruel deceptions, and come out at once.” After the service she told Dr. Phillips that she wanted to be baptized. He warned her, “ When you become a Christian you will have great sorrow. All will forsake you; and if you get no rice to eat, what will you do then ? ” “ God feeds the birds,” Chundra Lela answered, “ will he not feed me? He who made the mouth, can he not put food into it ? God will take care of me. I am not afraid.” Very soon after this she packed up all her belong- ings and moved to the home of the native pastor of the church. The news that she had gone to live with the Christians spread rapidly, and many of her friends and students gathered together and went to her, seek- ing to induce her to come back to them. But she told them that she could be a Hindu teacher no longer, for she was no longer a Hindu but a Christian. As proof positive that she meant what she said, she asked the pastor’s wife to bring her a cup of water, and drank the water before them, thus publicly breaking caste by drinking from a dish which a Christian’s hand had touched. Then, indeed, her friends were convinced, and went away, regretfully admitting that since Chun- A PILGRIM OF INDIA 39 dra Lela had broken her caste she could be nothing more to them. After her baptism the missionaries gave Chundra Lela work in the mission schools for children, and suggested that she teach the women in the zenanas to read. But she was too full of joy in the wonderful good news she had learned to be willing to give her time to teaching people how to read. At length she had found the God for whom she had sought so long; at last her soul was at peace, and she felt that she must tell others the glorious truths she had learned. Whenever she had a free moment she took her Bible and went from house to house, often telling the story tc groups in the streets until great crowds had gath- ered to hear her. She would scarcely stop to eat or to rest in the daytime, waiting until night to cook and eat her food. So the missionaries set her free from her other work and let her give her entire time to publishing abroad what great things the Lord had done for her. After she had worked in and around Midnapur for several years, Chundra Lela conceived the idea of going to some of the shrines which she had visited as a Hindu, to share her joy with the pilgrims who were seeking God as she had sought him; and once again she set out on a pilgrimage lasting several years. There were as many hardships to be met on this pil- grimage as on her early one, perhaps more, for she was- getting older and was not so vigorous as she had been; she no longer had a bag of gold pieces around 40 COMRADES IN SERVICE her waist, but often suffered from lack of food; and her fearless preaching of Christianity often brought persecutions upon her. Once she was beaten by an angry priest; a man with a sword threatened to kill her; the Hindu priests hired a mob to stone her; and once she was brought before the police for preaching Christianity. But in spite of poverty, ill- ness, and persecution this pilgrimage was a shining way for Chundra Lela. No longer was she blindly and fruitlessly seeking pardon for sin and fellowship with God. The Great Companion was always with her, the sense of his love and peace were ever in her heart, and no difficulties or trials were worthy to be compared with the joy of telling about him to those who were seeking and needing him, even as she had sought and needed him. In the course of her journeys she went to her own country, Nepal, and was there granted the great happiness of winning her brother to Christ. For over thirty years Chundra Lela went to and fro, from early morning until late in the evening, seeking to bring to her hungry-hearted Indian people the knowledge of a joyous gospel which would satisfy their every need. She went to all classes of people. Mrs. Lee, a missionary who learned to know her well, says : ? “ One day she would be found sitting at the feet of a native princess, reading the Bible to her and the women of the palace; another day in the bazaar, preaching to the throngs that come and go. At other times we have seen her come quietly into $ room filled A PILGRIM OF INDIA 4i with educated native gentlemen, and seating herself in her favorite position on the floor, begin to talk to them. At first they are inclined to ridicule her; but she goes on, until soon they forget she is a woman, and are astonished at her knowledge of their own sacred books, of which she is able to repeat, from memory, page after page. Soon they feel her su- periority, and one after another, in their intense inter- est, draw nearer and take their seats on the ground before her. She will hold them for hours, telling them of their own religion and its emptiness. She then presents Jesus in such a way that it seems to make them want to know him.” Mrs. Lee tells of one occasion on which Chundra Lela was preaching to a great company of people, when a missionary who was in the crowd said to the head man: “ How can you answer such truths as these? ” “ Oh,” the man answered, “ these women know nothing ! Wait till you hear the wisdom of our priest.” He went away and soon returned with the priest, who took his place among the people with much dignity. Chundra Lela looked up and greeted the priest pleas- antly, and remarked to the crowd, “ All this man knows I taught him, for it was I who taught him the Vedas (sacred books), and taught him to repeat prayers to the gods, and to per- form priestly ceremonies.” When she was about sixty-five years old and was growing feeble, the missionaries of the mission, of 42 COMRADES IN SERVICE which she was a member, proposed building a house for her. “What do you think? ” she exclaimed to Mrs. Lee. “ What do you think? The 4 Sihiab logue ’ (mission- ary gentlemen) have built me a house to die in ! When they first mentioned it to me I said, ‘ What ! a house to die in ? Do you know where I am to die ? It might be in the train, or on the river steamer; it might be in the distant jungle, or perhaps while preaching in the street. How will you gentlemen build me a house to die in ? ’ ‘ Oh/ said they, ‘ it is true we do not know; but when you are ill, as you were a few months ago, or tired, and wish to rest awhile, it will be well for you to have a house of your own/ ‘ How you friends do trouble me! What would I do with a house? I wish to be free from care. Then, too, it would cost money to keep it up/ ‘ Very well ; but we will give you a pension of a small amount monthly, and from this you could keep it in repair/ And I yielded.” “ One day after the Conference was over and we were back in Midnapur,” she went on to Mrs. Lee, “ the missionaries said to me, ‘ Come and see the spot we have selected for your house — under these mango trees, where you will be nice and quiet/ ‘ What ! ’ I said, ‘away off in this field? Oh, no! If you will build me a house, build it on the roadside — close up — so that when I am too old and weak to walk, I may crawl up to the door and preach to the people as they pass by/ ” So the missionaries did as she asked and built her A PILGRIM OF INDIA 43 “ a house by the side of the road, where the races of men go by.” “ And now I can preach as long as I live ! ” she exclaimed joyously. And as long as she lived, she did preach. As she grew more feeble it seemed sometimes that she was almost too weak to speak. But if there was an oppor- tunity to tell of the Pearl of Great Price for which she had sought so earnestly, and for the sake of which, when she found it, she had gladly given up all, the joy of the Lord would prove her strength and the old light would come flooding back into her face, and her voice would become strong and clear. And when the door into the Other Room opened, and she was sum- moned to enter into the joy of her Lord, she went with a shining face. A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS I ■will never these hills. quit until I see education spread all through — J. A. Burns. J. A. BURNS A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS In the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky live more than a half million Americans of whom most of las know very little. A little over two hundred years ago their ancestors were roaming the highlands of Scotland; later their great-great-grandfathers took up their muskets in the struggle for the freedom of the colonies ; and fifty years ago one hundred and twenty thousand of them left their mountain cabins to fight for the unity of their young country. The people who know them say that they are worth knowing; that they are most loyal citizens, vigorous in body and mind, friendly and fearless in spirit, unfalteringly true to their ideals of honor, and given to the most kindly and gracious hospitality. Yet these Highlanders of America are slaves, made so not by the power of men but by the power of illiteracy. All around them America has been grow- ing into a land more wonderful than the brightest dreams of the first settlers. But if Daniel Boone could take another trip through the Cumberland Moun- tains of Kentucky he would see no startling changes either in the country or the people. He would travel by the waterways, or over narrow trails, just as he used to do, for there still are no roads. The little log cabins in whose one or two narrow rooms from ten to twenty 45 46 COMRADES IN SERVICE people are crowded would look very familiar to him. “ The loom, the spinning-wheel, the lard-kettle, the candle-mold, the squirrel rifle/’ which are in those cabins now, are just like those of a hundred years ago; and just as in those days the women stand behind the * tables while their sinewy husbands and sons eat; and ride, sunbonneted, behind them on horseback to the little log churches. One difference however, Daniel Boone might notice. In his day not a few of the little cabins had book- shelves on which stood copies of ancient masterpieces of Greek and Roman literature. Some of the books are there still, but in homes where no man, woman, or child can either read or write. It has been hard to make a living in the Cumberland Mountains, and dur- ing this last marvelous century, teeming with inven- tions and the development of industries, the men of the mountains have spent all the days of their lives la- boriously raising their scanty crops with the help of the implements of a hundred years ago. The women meanwhile have been growing old at the hard work of making by hand every article of clothing and food and household furnishing which has been needed. In this country and among these people lives J. A. Burns. His father was a Primitive Bap- tist minister, who rode through the country preach- ing in the little log churches on Saturdays and Sundays, and worked on his hillside farm during the rest of the week. In order to live father and mother and children all worked incessantly. Every morning A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 47 before it was dawn Burns was up and out in the smoke- house, grinding corn or wheat for breakfast in the little hand-mill. “ This hand-mill,” he says, “ was made of two round stones, the top one working on a little wooden spindle which stuck up through the bottom one. You poured the wheat in a hole at the middle of the upper stone. The flour came out through a little outlet at the edges between the stones. There was a hickory handle which was fitted into the top stone, the upper end of the handle working in a supporting frame. This made the stone turn more easily. Two persons could turn it. It was done after the fashion of Palestine. It was the best mill we had. In perhaps fifteen minutes I would have flour or meal enough ground for breakfast. It was sweet flour. If we wanted to remove some of the grits or husks we would take a circular hoop made out of basswood bark and covered with a piece of muslin, and screen the flour through this.” After breakfast was over the boy took his hoe and went out to the steep hillside to try to raise more corn. Sometimes he went to the little wheat-field to reap, the best instrument for reaping which he knew about being a long sickle or “ reap hook,” which left many a scar on the fingers of his left hand. He remembers that when he first saw a reaping “ cradle ” he thought that it certainly was the best and easiest method of harvesting wheat which could possibly be invented. A reaping-machine would have seemed to him then nothing short of a miracle. When he and his brothers 43 COMRADES IN SERVICE had cut down the wheat, they brought their little bun- dles to the threshing-floor, and threshed them with flails made of a piece of hickory, one short section of which had been hammered and twisted until the fibers were loosened into a “ hinge.” After the wheat was threshed it had to be winnowed, very much as it used to be in Palestine when the grain and the chaff were tossed up letting the wind blow the chaff to one side. Burns had a share in every process which the wheat went through until it was ready to be put into the oven, and until he was sixteen years old he never tasted bread made with any other flour than the kind he ground in his little hand-mill. When Burns was thirteen years old, his father was preaching in West Virginia in a county which boasted a little school, and there the boy went for just three months. The next year he had three months more in school, and the year following four months. After that he worked for an older brother for some time; then supported himself in any way he could, farming a little, sometimes working for small wages, sometimes taking rafts of logs down the Kentucky river — doing whatever offered for a living. He grew tall and big-boned like most of the mountain men, and unusually powerful. The French-Eversole feud was raging in his early manhood, and Burns was in it. And one night in the course of that feud something happened which changed the current of life not only for Burns, but for a multi- tude of mountain boys like him. The enemy were A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 49 barricaded in a log cabin which Burns and his fellow combatants were determined to take. In the course of the struggle Burns received a terrific blow on the head from a rifle barrel, and being thought dead was dragged by his feet from the dooryard and thrown over a fence where he would be out of the way of the fighting. But Burns was not dead. Long after the fighting was over he crawled down to a near-by cabin for food. As his strength came back, however, he did not hurry to join his fellow feudists. A blow on the head could not frighten him but it could sober him, and he turned his face away from the settlement to the lonely mountains. For four days he was alone in the mountains, and when he came out it was with the determination to go to college! Alone in the stillness of the forests he had been asking why God had brought him back from the dead. There must be some purpose in what had befallen him. In the quiet days away from the rest of the world he saw his people as he had never seen them before. He could say of them then as now, “ They are the finest, bravest, fairest-minded people in the world,” but seeing them so, he saw as never before the pity of their ignorance, with all its attendant evils of poverty and narrowness and enmity. He believed that God had given him back his life that he might serve this people, and he was sure that what they needed most was an opportunity for Christian education. This he determined to help them to get. He had no money, and he had had but ten months in school him- 50 COMRADES IN SERVICE self, but he went out from the mountains to prepare himself to teach. For seven months Burns managed to support him- self at the preparatory school of Denison University, in Granville, Ohio. Then he went back to his moun- tains, as penniless as when he had come, but with seven more months of school life added to the ten which he had had in West Virginia. The next year he taught a hundred eager little mountain boys and girls at “ Raider’s Creek,” and in the six years that followed started schools in various other parts of the moun- tains. One year he taught at Berea College, Berea, Kentucky. Always the children flocked to him, hungry for the chance to study, and always his own education was growing both deeper and broader. And always in his heart he carried a vision — of which he almost never spoke — a vision of a time when in the heart of the wild, feud-fraught mountains there should be, not just little log-cabin country schools open for a few months a year, but a strong, splendid, permanent college ! He had no money for a college, and no idea where to get it. But in 1899 he decided that the time had come to take the first step. It was a troublous time in which to start a college. The Baker-Howard feud was on, and there had been much bloodshed. But Burns wanted to talk to the men of both sides about a college for their boys, so he called a meeting, himself a sort of hostage and pledge of good faith. About fifty men filed silently into the old mill that day, half of them on the Baker side, half A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 51 on the Howard. “ It was a mighty quiet meeting,” Burns says. In absolute stillness they seated them- selves on opposite sides of the room, every man with his gun on his arm, every one perfectly quiet but alert. Then Burns stood in the center and pleaded with them. He told them that they were rearing their sons for slaughter, and begged them to stop fighting and help him build a college where the boys could have an education. “ I didn’t know what they were going to do,” he said afterward, “ but I was right glad when Lee Combs got up, and when Dan Burns got up too, and they met in front of me. They did not draw, but they shook hands. Then I knew that the college was going to be a success.” A few days later twelve of these men came together in the little log church, and there six of them signed their names and six put their marks to an application for a state charter which would permit them to found a college in their mountains. When Burns started his college he had not one dol- lar. But one of the men who had put his mark to the application for a charter gave him fifty dollars, and some one else gave him some land, and he went to work. A blacksmith made him some stone-working tools out of a crowbar, and he began to cut the founda- tion-stones out of the mountain. Alone in the dawn one morning he laid the first stone of the first founda- tion of Oneida Institute. “ I set it as firmly as I could,” he says, “ in the 52 COMRADES IN SERVICE wish that it might stand long; and then, all alone on the hillside, I stretched out my arms and offered up as good a prayer as I knew how. About then a young feudist came riding over the hill beyond, perhaps from some raid in which he had been engaged the night before. It was sun-up, and he saluted the rising day with a volley of pistol shots; still, I presume, full of the fury of combat. I accepted that volley of shots as a challenge to my prayer. Three years later I baptized that young feudist, and he rides on feuds no more.” Single-handed, Burns hewed his stones and laid his foundations. When he began on the woodwork several of his neighbors joined him, and work went on all day and often late into the night. If Burns went home at night, he had to walk five miles over the hills, each way; so usually he worked until ten or eleven or midnight, and then curled up in the soft shavings under his carpenter’s bench for the rest of the night. The year after this first building, a boys’ dormitory, was finished, Burns went to Louisville, Kentucky, to a convention of Baptist ministers. He was asked to speak of his work, and those who heard that speech still talk of it. “ J. A. Burns,” says Emerson Hough, “ is an orator of unusual power, a cultured and educated man of singular purity of speech.” His brother ministers were not wealthy men, but the story that he told with his “ natural and convincing oratory,” gripped them, and they gave him four hundred dollars. A family in Louisville added five thousand, and with the help of A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 53 the building materials which the mountains afforded and the labor which the men of the mountains cheer- fully contributed Burns built a ten thousand dollar brick recitation hall. Two years after this building was fin- ished the boys were crowding to the school in such numbers that another dormitory was an urgent neces- sity. Burns had no money, but he started the dormi- tory. The neighbors gave what money they could, their labor, and their keen interest; some people out- side the mountains helped, and a year later a sub- stantial brick dormitory, worth ten thousand dollars, opened its doors. All this time Burns was not only architect and con- tractor and builder, but president and teacher and student as well. “ You see that big, flat rock yonder?” he said to Mr. Hough, as they stood on the bank of the Kentucky river. “ Well, that is the best fishing-place on the Kentucky river. It is lucky for me that it was. When I was beginning my work in Latin and some of the mathematics, my boys in the school up yonder on the hill were crowding hard on my heels all the time, and knew about as much as I did. I was on a keen jump, and just one day ahead of them. Moreover, I hadn’t anything to eat, in those days. My friend and fellow teacher and myself used to set our trawl- lines just out beyond that flat rock. Then we used to study our next day’s lessons in Latin and geometry by the light of a fire. ‘ God bless the catfish ! ’ I have said ever since. If it had not been that we had i 54 COMRADES IN SERVICE been favored in our fishing, I don’t know what might have happened to Oneida college ! ” They were worth every effort, these boys of the Kentucky Highlands. The chance to learn was like food to the starving, and no price that they could pay too great, no struggle too long. “ One boy came to me,” Burns told Mr. Hough, “ limping and tired. He had tuberculosis of the hip. He had no coat, hardly any shoes, almost no trou- sers, and he carried a carpetbag tied together with a piece of twine. His hair stuck out through his hat He had walked twenty or thirty miles. He said he wanted an education. . . . One day I heard some of my scholars whispering together out in the halL Whispering is against the rules, and I went out to dis- perse them. There seemed to be some conspiracy, and I found out what it was; those poor boys, who had earned a few cents by working on our farm, were taking up a collection, five cents, ten cents each, to get the ‘ new boy ’ a better pair of pants ! I did not dis- miss that meeting.” That “ new boy ” is soon to be in charge of educa- tional work himself. Nine times the bad hip was operated on, and the ninth time it was cured. The report of Oneida college spread across the Kentucky river into the Bullskin Valley, and one day “ old man Combs ” put two of his daughters on the back of a mule, took a third on another mule with him, and rode the fifty miles to the river, forded it, and drew up before the college door. Neither he nor any A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 55 one of the daughters could read or write, and he had brought them to the place where they could learn. Tears streamed down the faces of the girls and stood in the eyes of Burns of the Mountains when he told them that there was no room in which they could sleep, no food for them to eat, and no money with which to buy these things. With sad face the old man turned the mules’ heads and started on the homeward jour- ney. “ I watched them ford the river again, and turn back up the Bullskin Valley,” Burns said. “ My heart bled for them. I knew what they were going back to.” As he had dreamed of a college for the boys, so now Burns began to dream of a dormitory for the girls, which would make it possible for them to study with their brothers. So presently he gave out con- tracts for the building, engaged workmen, and went out to find some money. He went to Carrolton, where the White’s Run Baptist Association was meeting, and with twenty cents, which constituted his entire capital, in his pocket, told his friends what he wanted to do. “ Then,” he says, “ Mr. Carnahan, who has done so much for this college, said he would help on my labor pay-roll; and we borrowed five thousand dollars of a building and loan association that wasn’t afraid to lend to the Lord.” This dormitory was only a beginning of good things for the girls. The generous gift of a woman in New York who heard Burns tell of the ambitious, respon- sive mountain children, has made possible another ten 56 COMRADES IN SERVICE thousand dollar brick building, where cooking, sew- ing, sanitation, and other household subjects are taught. No boys were ever more eager for a chance than these girls of the mountains. Some of them write Mr. Burns letters like this: “ Prof. Burns oneda Ky I though i would write you to See if i could enter School with you all one a Free tuishen my father is ded and my mother is to Poor to send me to School and is not evan able to Furnish my Books and Close and Would Like to help make Suport fur the Familey and the way i am i Cant my ege is 19 and if you Cant hold me a Place in School can I get a job of house work. Can work at most anything in the house. i have a hard way of Living and making my Suport i live in the Country and cant get anything fur my work, now you let me Just what you will do and Let me no what you will Pay a week for cooking if i cant get in School. if i had Lurning i could make my mother Suport But as i am i cant will close hoping to here frome you Soon your reSPCtful P.S. Let me no if i can get in or i cant.” When these girls have had a chance to “ have lurn- ing,” they write papers which read, in part, like this : “ It is not an uncommon thing to find, anywhere in these mountains, families of ten or twelve living in one or two small rooms. There is practically no ALONE IN THE MOUNTAINS A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 57 ventilation, the food is only half cooked, and the natural outcome is that some member of the family is nearly always sick. To those who know the impor- tance of sanitation, wholesome, nutritious food, and pure air, it is not strange that so many people of the mountains are dying from tuberculosis and other con- tagious diseases. Very few of the people believe that tuberculosis is contagious, and therefore make no fight against it. The same holds with other preventable and curable diseases from which thousands are dying each year. “ Only for the past few years have we been alive to the fact that in order to make the mountain home what it should be, the girls must be educated. Since this is true, then, do not let us neglect the most important part of our training, training for that vocation for which every girl should prepare herself, the most sacred position any girl can hold, that of home- maker. “ The rise or fall of the future generation of moun- taineers rests with the girls and boys of the present day, and, I should say, the greater responsibility rests with the girls. The woman has the training of the children, and by surrounding them in the home with those things which tend to best development, phys- ically, mentally, and morally, she will be laying the foundation on which the success of their lives and the greatness of the nation depend.” It does not take a great amount of money to get “ lurning ” at Oneida Institute, — only four dollars a 58 COMRADES IN SERVICE month for room, board, and tuition. Very little money is paid out for food or servant hire. The boys culti- vate the fields, and raise nearly all the food which the five hundred and twenty-four students eat, and in the doing of it learn modern scientific methods of agricul- ture which will help them to win such crops from their mountain soil as it has never before yielded. The girls not only study the theory of home-keeping, but by practical experience they learn how to care for their dormitory rooms, how to dress suitably, how to cook and serve wholesome food. Last summer they put up six hundred gallons of fruit and wild blackberries for use on the school table. “ The breed of Lincoln is not gone!’' Emerson Hough declared, after he had met Burns of the Moun- tains. Burns too is an emancipator, he too is setting a people free — free from the bondage in which igno- rance has held them. And they are a people worthy of their freedom. Of them Burns says : “ If these people were what the outside world has so long supposed them to be — savage, selfish, lawless, broilers, feudists, murderers — I would not try to help them, nor wish to do so. But they are not that. They are a simple, bold, honorable, gen- erous, and able people, a splendid stock; and they must not be allowed to go on as they have — they are too good for that.” “ We want our place in the ranks of the useful citizenship of America,” he cries. “ We are not content either to stand still or to slip back as we have been doing. We want out and we want up! A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 59 However much the country helps us, we will pay it back again.” Pledge and prophecy of what his mountaineers can be is Burns himself, “ a college president with only seventeen months of school,” who has built “ a hun- dred thousand dollar college with no better start than twenty cents.” “ J. A. Burns,” says Emerson Hough, “ will live and die in that valley, not much heralded, not much known, but his part of the country and ours will have been the better for his life and his vision. Such men give us a better hope of the future of Amer- ica. I felt the strength of America itself back of this simple mountaineer when I talked with him.” “ Some of you remember me when I came here, and you know me now,” one of the Oneida girls said when she graduated. “ If I am anything, if I ever shall be anything, I gratefully acknowledge it to be the work of this institution and especially of Professor Burns. Often the one thought that some day I may, in some way, be able to show my appreciation for what he has done for me, that I may, perhaps, please him, as a slight return for his influence, has forced me on when nothing else could.” And Mr. Hough writes, " There was something I wanted to say to him and never did say — I wanted to tell him how ashamed I was bf my life, which had made so little out of good opportunity, whereas others have made so much out of none.” But Burns of the Mountains thinks not at all of what people say of him — his mind is too full of the vision 6o COMRADES IN SERVICE splendid of a new and radiant day for the children of the Cumberlands. “ I never will quit,” he pledges, “ I never will be done until I see education spread all through these hills. I ask God to spare me till that time has come.” THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN Be so busy living that you never have time to take thought of dying, for when you have learned how to live, you needn’t be bothered with learning how to die. — Kaji Yajitna. KAJI YAJIMA THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN Eighty-two years ago a baby girl was born in the home of one of the “ town supervisors ” of the prefec- ture of Kumamoto, Japan. Her father was a man of much prominence and influence, but there were many poor people in his district who needed to learn how to earn a living and to make the most of the little they had ; and, in order to help to teach them how, the town supervisor and his family worked as hard and lived as simply as they did. Just as soon as the six little girls of the family were old enough they learned to help their mother take care of the silkworms, to reel and weave the silk, and later to cut it and make it into kimonos. All day long they were busy with this work and household tasks, but in the evening they, with their brother, gathered about their mother, who taught them to make the difficult characters of the Japanese alphabet, with a soft brush, and to understand what they meant. There were no schools for girls in Japan in those days, but these little girls never missed them, for, after they had learned from their mother how to read and write, their father taught them the Confucian classics and the ancient literature of Japan. When Kaji, next to the youngest of these little girls, was about twenty years old, she married. The hardest 61 62 COMRADES IN SERVICE years of her life followed, for her husband proved to be a drunkard, and in spite of his wife’s influence he never succeeded in conquering his weakness. For sev- eral years Mrs. Yajima did her utmost to help her hus- band and make a home, but at last she was released, and, broken in health, went back to her parents! Her only thought at this time was to spend the rest of her life there in peace and quiet. No other idea ever oc- curred to her. No life outside the home was open to women in old Japan, and, moreover, even the men of Japan began to think of retiring from active life at forty or fifty, and Mrs. Yajima was now almost forty years of age. But great changes had been taking place in the little island empire during the years of Mrs. Yajima’s mar- ried life. At the time of her marriage Japan was a medieval nation in all that the term implies. Condi- tions there were very similar to those in the Scotland of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. A feudal clan system prevailed, the country being divided among several great military nobles, known as Daimios, each with fortified castle and retinue of armed retainers of Samurai. Nominally the country was ruled by the emperor, but in reality the emperor was a helpless puppet, the actual power being in the hands of the most powerful of the military nobles, who was known as the shogun. Japan at this time was not only medieval : she was also a hermit nation, living in absolute isolation from all the rest of the world. She had not always been THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 63 thus closed to all outside influences. In the sixteenth century she had been open to trade with Europe, and with the traders had come Roman Catholic mission- aries who were very successful in winning converts. But after some years of trade with Spain and Portugal Japan began to suspect that these nations were plan- ning to overthrow her, and that the missionary priests were their agents. In 1614, the shogun believed that he had discovered a plot to undermine his power; and he at once issued an edict, denouncing all missionaries as enemies of the gods and of Japan, and ordering them, and all Japanese who had become priests, to leave the country at once. He also ordered all native Chris- tians to recant, on pain of death. In the years that followed thousands upon thousands of Japanese Chris- tians suffered unspeakable tortures rather than give up their faith. They were crucified, buried alive, burned at the stake, torn limb from limb, and hideously tortured, rather than recant. At one time thirty-seven thousand of them were massacred together. Finally Christianity seemed almost stamped out, but as late as 1873 placards were posted in various public places offering generous rewards to all who would give infor- mation against those who were suspected of being followers of the foreign faith. The shogun also is- sued most stringent edicts banishing all foreigners ex- cept the Dutch and the Chinese from the country on pain of death; sternly forbade any others to enter at any future time; and with equal severity forbade any 64 COMRADES IN SERVICE Japanese to leave his country, enforcing this order by destroying all sea-going vessels. For two hundred and thirty years Japan succeeded in remaining in complete and unbroken isolation. In 1850 she was the same Japan which in 1624 had locked its doors, both outside and in, still living the life of the Middle Ages, serenely ignorant of and in- different to the stirring modern life of the European nations. But in 1853 there came an interruption. A representative of a nation which Japan had scarcely heard of sailed across the Pacific and knocked politely but insistently upon her inhospitable door. In July of that year an American squadron anchored at the mouth of the Gulf of Yedo, and its commander, Com- modore Perry, succeeded after not a little difficulty in delivering to the authorities the letter which he brought from the President of the United States, urging Japan to enter into commercial treaties with the young repub- lic across the seas. During the decade following the delivery of this letter the long-closed door of Japan swung gradually open, until at last treaties had been made opening several important ports to trade with the United States, England, France, and other nations, and also permitting members of these nations to live within these ports. The year 1865, when all these treaties were ratified by the emperor, marked the final ending of Japan’s seclusion and medievalism and the beginning of a new and stirring life. The first step in this new life was the revolution which took place in 1868 and was one of the most THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 65 remarkable revolutions the world has ever seen. Many of the strongest Daimios united together against the shogun, compelled him to resign, seized the palace at Kyoto and proceeded to administer the government in the name of the emperor. Civil war followed, but the adherents of the emperor soon conquered; the shogun- ate which had lasted for seven hundred years was overthrown and in a few months the young emperor was everywhere acknowledged the real as well as the nominal ruler of the nation. By the time Mrs. Yajima’s married life was ended, the old Japan was a thing of the past. The young, energetic emperor set himself to the task of bringing his nation into line with the modern world as quickly as possible, and the rapidity with which he succeeded seemed almost miraculous. Mrs. Yajima’s brother was in the employ of the progressive new government, in Tokyo, and it was to the very heart of the stirring new life that his illness called her in 1871. Many of the things she saw in the capital interested her greatly, but none more than the schools for boys and girls which were being estab- lished under the new educational system, modeled on that of Massachusetts. Only a few years before there had been only a few schools for boys, and none at all for girls, but now the government proposed to estab- lish public schools for both boys and girls all over the country making attendance at them compulsory. The greatest difficulty was in the matter of teachers. Hundreds were needed, but how could people who had 66 COMRADES IN SERVICE never been to school themselves know how to conduct a school ? The government was trying to meet this diffi- culty, however, by a training course for those who wished to become teachers in the new schools. The first class was just about to begin training when Mrs. Yajima’s brother was well enough to dispense with his sister’s care, and he strongly urged her to take the course. This was a startling idea to Mrs. Yajima. She had thought that active life was over for her, and at first it seemed impossible to begin a wholly new work and one which no Japanese woman had ever attempted before. Moreover she had no confidence in her own ability and doubted whether she could ever learn to teach. But the work attracted her greatly, and she finally yielded to her brother’s advice and took the training, being a member of the first class which received certificates from- the “ Teachers’ Training Association,” which later developed into the government normal school. For four years Mrs. Yajima taught in the primary schools of Tokyo. As she taught she became increas- ingly convinced of the truth of what she has so often said since : “ Education without religion is only partial preparation for life.” She came gradually to feel, too, that the religion which her parents had taught her was not the one which afforded the best preparation for living. She had read of the prayer which Commodore Perry had made upon entering Japan, in which he spoke of the people who had given him none too gracious a welcome as his brothers. This thought of THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 67 the brotherhood of the people of all nations im- pressed her very strangely and made her begin to feel that the religion of which it was a part could not be all bad, in spite of what she had been taught to believe. Moreover, when she was in Tokyo, she met certain peo- ple who seemed to her different from any she had ever known. She says that even before she knew anything of the religion which they professed she could not help noticing their fineness and strength. One of them was a young woman who had taken the teachers’ training course with her, and at last Mrs. Yajima asked her where she went every Sunday and finally began to go to church with her. The more she learned of Christianity the more it appealed to her, until at last her interest became so evident that it attracted the attention of her fellow teachers. Religious liberty was not guaranteed until 1889, and the placards offering rewards to in- formers against Christians remained up until 1873, an d Mrs. Yajima found that her interest in Christianity led to such hostile feeling against her that she finally resigned her position. At just about this time Mrs. True, a missionary, was establishing a school for girls, but, as she had not yet learned the Japanese language, she very much needed the help of an able Japanese woman. Mr. Yasukawa, pastor of a church in Tokyo, had become acquainted with Mrs. Yajima, and at his recommendation she went to Mrs. True in 1877 and began the educational work for Japanese girls in which she was associated with the Presbyterian missionaries for thirty-five years. 68 COMRADES IN SERVICE Her interest in Christianity grew rapidly after she be- gan her work with Mrs. True, for Mrs. True’s life was a constant inspiration to her, and convinced her that the religion which she taught must be the true one. Not long after coming to Graham Seminary she united with the Presbyterian church of which she has been a most loyal and faithful member ever since, never hesitating even yet, although she is over eighty, to walk a mile, alone if necessary, to attend its serv- ices. Mrs. Yajima worked with Mrs. True in Graham Seminary for several years, and then became the principal of another Christian school for girls, which had been established by a Japanese Christian woman, who finally turned it over to the Presbyterian mission. In 1890 this school was united with Graham Seminary to form the Joshi Gakuin, the splendid Presbyterian school for girls in Tokyo. Mrs. Yajima was appointed the principal of the new institution, and for over twenty years stood at its head. Before she laid down her active work in the Joshi Gakuin, in 1913, she had seen it grow into one of the largest and most advanced schools for girls in Japan, employing twenty Japanese teachers and five missionaries, with an average attend- ance of one hundred and sixty girls in the academy and thirty in the collegiate department. In 1886 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union sent Mrs. Mary C. Leavitt to Japan to organize a de- partment there. This was no easy task, for, while Japan had become almost startlingly modem in many THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 69 respects, woman’s life was the last to feel the effects of the fresh impulses from the West. Not many Japanese women had as yet dreamed of the possibility of assum- ing any responsibilities outside the home, and the idea of a great national organization wholly controlled by women was appalling to them. It may well be doubted whether Mrs. Leavitt could have succeeded in organiz- ing the Temperance Union without the whole-hearted help of Mrs. Yajima, who went from house to house, calling upon strangers as well as friends, firing her countrywomen with her own enthusiasm and making them believe in the cause so thoroughly that they were willing to attempt tasks hitherto undreamed of. Her energy and devotion were indefatigable; no effort was too great to make for a work which would save other homes from that which had ruined hers. Moreover, when she was a teacher in the primary schools, she had investigated the families of the boys and girls who did not do well in their studies and had found that eight tenths of these children came from homes where one or both parents drank. Mrs. Leavitt could have found no more intelligent, no more ardent opponent of sake , 1 the Japanese liquor, than Mrs. Yajima, nor could she have secured a more capable leader for the new movement. After the work was finally started, with a member- ship of thirty Christian women, Mrs. Yajima gave every atom of time and strength which could be spared from her school work to building up the new organization. It was not easy. Mrs. Iwamoto, one of the supporters Pronounced sah'-ke. 70 COMRADES IN SERVICE of the new work, wrote ten years after the Union was organized : “ Only those who have been in the heart of the movement can know how very arduous Kyofokwai (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union) work has been and what patience it cost its first advocates to work it up, in the face of all manner of obstacles, to its present growth. Naturally there had been opposi- tion to women taking up this kind of public work, and even Christians have not all been in favor of it. Be- sides, Japanese ladies have not nearly the same amount of time and money to contribute to public enterprises as foreign ladies of equal position in society. It is a matter well known how arduous a task it has been to keep the work going, as well as support the organ of the society, which was begun some years later, and edited solely by Kyofokwai ladies. But Mrs. Yajima and her associates have struggled bravely on to this day, and both the Christian and non-Christian public have come to recognize the monument of their patience and labors.” The matter of financial support was one of the great- est difficulties, for even the most interested Japanese women had little money to give. But if there was a need, Mrs. Yajima refused to be discouraged by lack of funds. Little by little, here and there, she herself collected 272 yen for the first Rescue Home ; and when the Woman's Herald, which she herself carried on for several years, had a deficit she quietly paid it from her own funds. The work over which Mrs. Yajima now presides THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 7 1 consists of sixty-nine branches in various parts of Japan, with a membership of over 5,000. Its activities are divided into thirteen departments : Legislation, Flower Mission, Mothers’ Meetings, Rescue Work, Soldiers, Literature, Scientific Temperance, Education, Hygiene, Work in Factories, Evangelistic Work, Anti-Narcotics, and Mercy. Two magazines are now published, one of which has a subscription list of 1,200, the other of 11,000; a night school for young women is carried on ; a rescue home endeavors to do both pre- ventive and reformative work; and so large a work is done among children that a young Japanese woman, Miss Moriya, gives practically her entire time to that department. The years during which Japan was at war with Russia were overwhelmingly busy ones for Mrs. Ya- jima. Many people were eager to send “ comfort bags ” to the sailors, and the government decided to permit such bags to be sent provided that the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union would assume the respon- sibility of seeing that at least 30,000 bags were fur- nished, and of inspecting each bag to see that no ob- jectionable object or literature was contained in it. The government seal was entrusted to Mrs. Yajima, and the government held her personally responsible for the number, size, and contents of all the bags. No Tag was permitted to go until she had stamped it, but after her stamp was on it, it went straight to the sailors without further inspection. This meant no light responsibility, for in the first place Mrs. Yajima 72 COMRADES IN SERVICE had to guarantee that no less than 30,000 bags should be sent, and not a few of her associates felt that this number was impossibly large. Then each bag must be inspected to see that it held nothing except the articles approved by the government, such as towels, handkerchiefs, stockings, undershirts, tooth-brushes and tooth-powder, writing materials, sewing materials, approved medicine, sweetmeats that would not spoil in transportation, and other articles. After the bag had been inspected a Testament and some leaflets were added to its contents, and Mrs. Yajima stamped it. After weeks of work 30,000 bags were sent to the navy. The Union’s work was by no means over, how- ever, for no sooner had the men of the navy received their bags than the soldiers in the army pleaded for a similar gift, and Mrs. Yajima began work on a second lot of 30,000. One of her most treasured possessions is the set of bowls, decorated with the imperial seal, which the emperor sent her as a token of his personal appreciation of her months of work on behalf of the soldiers ; but no less valued are the five thousand letters which came from the men of the army and navy them- selves. In 1906 the World’s Woman’s Christian Temper- ance Union held a convention in Boston, and Mrs. Yajima was asked to bring greetings from Japan. She was seventy-four years old, she had never been out- side of Japan, and she knew no English, and few of her friends encouraged her to make the long journey, but she decided to go. She felt that the Woman’s THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 73 Christian Temperance Union in Japan needed two per- manent missionaries who could give their full time to the work, and she wanted to present that plea to the great company at Boston. She had a niece in college in California who promised to take her across the con- tinent, but she took the long voyage across the Pacific alone. While she was on the steamer she learned the Shepherd Psalm by heart, in English, that she might be able to give that “ kokoro kara ” (greeting) straight from her heart, without an interpreter. Mrs. Yajima made a great impression on the audi- ence which she addressed in Boston. Both she and her niece, who acted as her interpreter, “ captured the con- vention by the naivete and charm of their responses and greetings,” says a report of the gathering. “ Con- spicuous on the platform stood a Japanese banner of crimson satin exquisitely embroidered in white and gold. ‘ Our nation is small/ said Mrs. Yajima, ‘ our people are small ; therefore we bring a large banner.’ ” In the course of her address she remarked, “ Every one who sees me says I am young. I say there is a reason that I must be young. I was bom in the new life of Christianity only twenty-six years ago, so I am only twenty-six years old, and I must work at least thirty years or forty years more from to-day.” At the close of her address the great audience rose and gave her the “ white ribbon cheer,” and the national secre- taries presented her with beautiful flowers. Her visit to America accomplished all that she had hoped it might, for the convention pledged itself to 74 COMRADES IN SERVICE support one temperance missionary to Japan and a New York member promised to support a second worker. Moreover one young woman became so much interested in Japan and the work of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union there, through meeting Mrs. Yajima, that she became one of the two mis- sionaries. Before leaving America Mrs. Yajima was received by President Roosevelt, and tendered to him her grate- ful thanks for his service as a mediator between Japan and Russia. Although over eighty Mrs. Yajima is as indefatiga- ble as ever. A recent report from Miss Ruth Davis, missionary of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Japan, reads : “ This last May she (Mrs. Yajima) passed her eightieth birthday in the city of Nagasaki while on a month’s tour of the southern island of Kyushu. It would be wonderful in any coun- try, and it is especially wonderful in Japan, where the custom of retiring from active life at the age of fifty has not yet gone entirely out of fashion, for a woman of Mrs. Yajima’s age to undertake such a journey, and to succeed in accomplishing the amount of work she planned for herself. Altogether she held sixty meetings and addressed over fifteen thousand people, speaking in girls’ high schools, before branches of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and in the churches. She organized two new branches of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and gained one hundred and fifty active members for the societies THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 75 which were already in existence. Her traveling com- panion tells us that never once in the course of her journey did Madame Yajima say she was tired.” When the Yoshiwara 1 of Tokyo, the section of the city given up to houses of prostitution, was destroyed by fire, in 1911, Mrs. Yajima was one of the leading spirits in the campaign organized by the Salvation Army, the Young Men’s Christian Association, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union for the purpose of preventing its rebuilding. Although Mrs. Yajima was then seventy-eight years old, she presided over fifteen of the great mass-meetings held in the interests of this campaign, making a short address herself on each occasion. She also drew up the peti- tion which was presented to the mayor, by her own efforts obtained ten thousand signatures to it, and pre- sented it to the mayor in person. She received in- numerable anonymous letters telling her that unless she stopped her efforts to prevent the rebuilding of the Yoshiwara her life would not be safe from day to day. But Mrs. Yajima paid no heed to these threats and went serenely on with her work, though it was often necessary for her to return from meetings in her jinrickisha at eleven or twelve o’clock at night. Mrs. Yajima has lost none of her power as a speaker as she has grown older. Dr. Pettee, in giv- ing an account of the national convention of the : A district in Tokyo appropriated to the sex evil, with imposing buildings and features of most regrettable display of the young women devoted to immorality. 76 COMRADES IN SERVICE Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, says that her age would never be suspected, “ as you note the zeal and tact with which she presided over that great meet- ing, and especially if you were privileged to witness the businesslike manner in which she called through the telephone for a shorthand reporter to take down a full stenographic account of the proceedings. No wonder, she was enthusiastically received,” he ex- claimed, “ being twice given a Chautauqua salute, and was unanimously reelected president for another year.” She is still acceptable to the largest audiences. A recent note in the Japan Evangelist reads : “ A large public meeting was held in the evening in an immense hall. . . . About one thousand people gathered to listen to members of Parliament, who made powerful appeals for the highest moral standard. . . . Mrs. Yajima made the opening address.” “ Perhaps no un- titled Japanese woman,” says Dr. Pettee of Japan, “ has served on more important committees, graced more social functions, or exerted a wider influence in the moral uplift of the nation than modest Mrs. Yajima. She is loved and honored alike by her own people and by foreigners; by Christians and other religionists; by those of high estate and also by the lowly poor.” One of the staunchest of her friends isCountOkuma, the present premier of Japan. There is no tie of blood between them, but Count Okuma is fond of referring to Mrs. Yajima as “ nei san ” (older sister), claiming relationship to her on the ground of the kindred ideals THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 77 and ambitions for Japan which both are seeking to realize. “ I have never known Count Okuma to refuse any request Mrs. Yajima made of him,” one of her friends writes. “ Both he and the countess are honor- ary members of the Temperance Union and have con- tributed generously toward its support, and time and again their beautiful home and gardens have been opened for its gatherings.” Count Okuma has also been a frequent speaker at meetings held under the auspices of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Mrs. Yajima is herself the living exponent of the doctrine which she is constantly giving to the young people before whom she speaks. There are two rules for a long and happy life, she tells them: first, abstain from all things harmful ; second, be so busy with good | and useful work for others that there is no time for thought of self. “ Be so busy living,” she says, “ that you never have time to take thought of dying, for | when you have learned how to live , you needn’t be bothered with learning how to die.” Such advice from Mrs. Yajima is very convincing, for no one who knows how she fills each day to the brim with glad self-giving can doubt that she has so learned to live that when she lays down the tasks of earth it will be with joyous eagerness to take up the more perfect service of an even richer and more radiant life. A MAN WITH A MESSAGE I was ready to take all men to my heart. — Dwight L. Moody. DWIGHT L. MOODY A MAN WITH A MESSAGE The village of East Northfield, Massachusetts, was not a very large place in the middle of the last century, and life there used sometimes to seem a trifle slow to one of its youthful inhabitants. But there were ways to vary the monotony. One was to lead his will- ing schoolmates to the cattle sheds of “ Squire ” Alexander, where a number of young steers were kept. A quiet climb to the empty rafters suddenly followed by a chorus of wild Indian war-whoops and vigorous jumping on the loose planks furnished almost un- limited excitement for wildly fleeing steers, irate squire, and gleeful small boys. The appropriation of the squire’s old pung to coast down the steep hill below his house was another adventure sufficiently reckless to be full of zest. Once a neat notice appeared on the schoolhouse door, stating that an out-of-town speaker would deliver a lecture on temperance there on a cer- tain evening. When the evening came the school- house was warmed and lighted for the occasion, and a number of people gathered to listen to the words of wisdom of the lecturer. But no lecturer appeared, and the audience finally dispersed, full of indignation at the practical joker whose identity no one knew, except a certain small boy who was loud in his con- 79 8o COMRADES IN SERVICE demnation of such a foolish joke. At another time this small boy was to give Mark Antony’s oration over Julius Caesar at the “ closing exercises ” of the district school. Just before his oration he introduced a touch of realism by placing on the desk a long nar- row box to represent the coffin of the deceased Caesar. In the height of his eloquence an impassioned gesture knocked off the box cover, and out sprang a terrified tom-cat, who dashed wild-eyed into the midst of a startled and almost equally terrified audience. The stocky little boy who was the perpetrator of all these pranks was Dwight Lyman Moody, next to the youngest son in the family of nine sturdy Moody children. His father died suddenly while he was still a very little boy, and practically everything which the family owned, even to the kindling in the woodshed, was taken by his creditors. Dwight never forgot the morning after the kindling-wood had been taken, when the children were told to stay in bed until school-time to keep warm. Many neighbors and friends advised “ Widow Moody ” to break up the home and place the children with families which would care for them. But, al- though she had nothing left but her children and al- most no means of support, Mrs. Moody never for a moment considered such a plan as this. It was neces- sary, however, to take the boys from school and let them go to work while they were still little chaps. When Dwight was only ten, an older brother found a place for him to work during the winter months in a village A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 81 thirteen miles from Northfield, and one November morning the little fellow left home to take his part in the family's difficult task of keeping the wolf from the door. “ Do you know,” he said, many years later, “ No- vember has always been a dreary month to me, ever since. As we passed over the river and up the oppo- site side of the valley we turned to look back for a last view of home. It was to be my last for weeks, for months, perhaps forever, and my heart well-nigh broke at the thought. That was the longest journey I ever took, for thirteen miles was more to me at ten than the world’s circumference has been ever since.” There was no thought of turning back, however, for he had promised to go, and the Moody boys had been taught that a promise must be kept at all costs. The Moody children knew much of poverty and hard work, nothing of luxuries, and not much of com- fort; but their mother taught them not only to be satisfied with little, but to share that little with those who had less. When she let them vote one evening, just as they were sitting down to a very scanty supper, whether they would share it with a hungry beggar, it was unanimously decided that their slices should be cut a little thinner that the hungry man might have a part. The religious teaching which Dwight L. Moody received as a child was very different in one way from that which his own children received, for he knew almost nothing of the Bible. But though he lacked 8 2 COMRADES IN SERVICE familiarity with the Book which he afterward held as “ the dearest thing on earth,” he did not lack a knowl- edge of the God of whom the Bible taught. Every Sunday, rain or shine, the Moody children, big and little, started off for church, their lunch pails in one hand and in summer their shoes and stockings in the other. They spent the day at the church, hearing a sermon both morning and afternoon, and then all trooped home for supper. “ Trust in God ” was the sum and substance of their mother’s creed, and even while they were still very little things the children showed that they had learned to love and trust him too. When Dwight was seventeen years old he deter- mined to go to Boston to find work. He had no money, but he decided that he would go, even if he had to walk all the way. His mother could not help him, but on his way to the station he met an older brother, who gave him five dollars, which was just enough to pay his railroad fare. The first days in Boston were probably the unhappiest in his life. “ I remember how I walked up and down the streets try- ing to find a situation,” he said, many years later, “ and I recollect how, when they answered me roughly, their treatment would chill my soul. But when some one would say, 4 1 feel for you ; I would like to help you but I can’t; but you’ll be all right soon!’ I felt happy and light-hearted. That man’s sympathy did me good. It seemed as if there was room for every one else in the world, but none for me. For about A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 83 two days I had the feeling that no one wanted me. I never have had it since, and I never want it again. It is an awful feeling! ” He had two uncles in the shoe business in the city, but they did not offer to give him work, and it was a long time before he was willing to ask for it. When he finally did go to his uncle, he found him very willing to employ him, and for two years he was one of the most successful salesmen in his uncle’s store. It was during his stay in Boston that Mr. Moody definitely enrolled himself as a follower of Jesus Christ. One day while he was at work wrapping up shoes in his uncle’s store, his Sunday-school teacher, Mr. Kim- ball, came in, and laying his hand on his shoulder began to talk with him. “ I simply told him of Christ’s love for him and the love Christ wanted in return,” Mr. Kimball said. “ That was all there was. It seemed the young man was just ready for the light that broke upon him, and there, in the back of that store in Boston, he gave himself and his life to Christ.” “ I remember the morning on which I came out of my room after I had first trusted Christ,” Moody says. “ I thought the old sun shone a good deal brighter than it ever had before. I thought that it was just smiling upon me; and as I walked out upon Boston Common and heard the birds singing in the trees I thought they were all singing a song to me. Do you know, I fell in love with the birds I I had never cared for them be- fore. It seemed to me that I was in love with all 84 COMRADES IN SERVICE creation. I had not a bitter feeling against any man, and I was ready to take all men to my heart.” After two years in Boston, Moody decided that there was greater opportunity for a young business man in the West, and in the autumn of 1856 went to Chicago. He secured a good position soon after he arrived, and at once allied himself with the Plymouth Congregational Church. He was very eager to do some kind of Christian work, and having no faith in his ability to teach or speak, he decided that he would rent a pew in the Plymouth Church and fill it with young men every Sunday. There was doubtless a large number of much-startled young men in Chicago every Sunday morning at this time, for he waited for no introductions but hailed perfect strangers on the street corner, or invaded the boarding-houses and even the saloons, with his novel invitation. His hos- pitality was irresistible, and he was soon renting four pews and filling every seat in them with his guests each Sunday. Then he looked around for something to do on Sunday afternoons. He soon discovered a little mis- sion Sunday-school on North Wells Street, where there were sixteen teachers to twelve pupils, and he at once constituted himself the school’s recruiting agent. The first Sunday he appeared with eighteen ragged little urchins, who increased the enrolment of the Sunday- school one hundred and fifty per cent. Every Sunday afternoon for several weeks thereafter he appeared, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with a troop of new A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 85 small boys and girls behind him, until the Wells Street Sunday-school was so full that he decided that his serv- ices were no longer needed. He then devoted his energy to building up another mission Sunday-school in another part of the city with such success that it was soon necessary to rent a larger public hall in which to hold it. “ Sunday was a busy day for me then,” Mr. Moody used to say. “ During the week I would be out of town as a commercial traveler, selling boots and shoes, but I would always manage to be back by Saturday night. Often it was late when I got to my room, but I would have to be up by six o’clock to get the hall ready for Sunday-school. This usually took most of the morning, and when it was done I would have to drum up the scholars and new boys and girls. By the time two o’clock came we would have the hall full, and then I had to keep order while the speaker for the day led the exercises. When school was over I visited absent scholars and found out why they were not at Sunday-school, called on the sick, and invited the parents to attend the gospel service. By the time I had made my rounds the hour had come for the even- ing meeting, where I presided, and following that we had an after-meeting. By the time I was through the day I was tired out.” Mr. Moody’s irrepressible enthusiasm and energy soon built up a thriving Sunday-school of fifteen hun- dred pupils, and a large staff of strong teachers. He did not act as superintendent himself, and usually left 86 COMRADES IN SERVICE most of the teaching to others, but he was inevitably the center of attraction for the children. As the school grew, its work naturally extended beyond the children to the parents, and the young Sunday-school worker soon saw that he could not meet the needs and opportunities for work in the neigh- borhood and go on with his business as well. The struggle that followed this realization was a severe one, for young Moody was already an unusually suc- cessful business man. He had risen rapidly since coming to Chicago, and although less than twenty- four years old had earned $5,000 on commissions in a single year, in addition to his salary. Moreover it was very hard for him to turn his back upon a work in which he had been eminently successful, to enter one which would require him to do many things for which he felt he was not fitted. He knew that he could bring young men to church to hear other men preach, and could fill a big Sunday-school with pupils for other teachers, but it was a long time before he saw that he must be ready not only to recruit, but to teach and preach as well. His first attempts at speaking in public had not met with a great deal of encouragement. After his first testimony in prayer-meeting a frank old deacon as- sured him that, in his opinion, he would serve God best by keeping still. Another fellow church-member praised his work as a filler of pews, but urged him to limit his Christian service to such lines as that, and not attempt to speak in public. “ You make too many A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 87 mistakes in grammar,” he told him. Moody accepted the criticism good-naturedly and humbly. “ I know I make mistakes,” he said, “ and I lack a great many things, but I am doing the best I can with what I’ve got.” Then after a moment’s pause he added, with irresistible good-humor and earnestness, “ Look here, friend; you’ve got grammar enough — what are you doing with it for the Master? ” It is not surprising that it was hard for Moody to decide to give himself wholly to a task which inevitably included some public work. But he finally turned his back squarely and forever upon the business world, in which he had already achieved notable success and which held such glowing promises for the future. He had saved $7,000 and he decided to live on this as long as it lasted. In order to make it hold out as long as possible he left his comfortable boarding- house for a cot in the prayer-meeting room of the Young Men’s Christian Association and irregular meals at a cheap restaurant. His one thought was to make his savings last, and he did not realize the neces- sity of making his health last, too. He used often to say in later years, “ I was an older man before thirty than I have ever been since. A man’s health is too precious to be as carelessly neglected as was mine.” Morning, noon, and night young Moody now de- voted himself to aggressive Christian work. He kept up his big Sunday-school and spent much time visiting in the homes of the hundreds of children who filled the big hall every Sunday, and interesting the parents 88 COMRADES IN SERVICE in the evangelistic meetings which he was conducting almost every evening. He usually secured outside speakers for these meetings, but sometimes led them himself. Every noon found him at the daily prayer- meeting of the Young Men’s Christian Association, the responsibility for which had been entrusted to him. The Rev. H. C. Mabie tells of the first time he met Moody, at one of these noon prayer-meetings. “ As we passed in there was a stocky, bustling Simon-Peter sort of a man standing at the door, and shaking hands with all who entered. He spoke an earnest word to each. At the close of the meeting this same man remained to speak and pray with an in- quirer or two who had shown signs of interest during the meeting. This honest man was Mr. Moody, and he made an impression on me for life. I had never before seen a layman so making it his business to press men into the Kingdom as he seemed to be doing.” When the Civil War broke out, Moody at once joined the western branch of the Christian Commis- sion, and gave himself to Christian work among the soldiers. After the great battle of Pittsburg Landing a large company of doctors and nurses were sent from Chicago to care for the wounded, and Moody went with them. He was one of the first, too, to help with the wounded after the battles of Shiloh, and Murfreesboro, and was with the army at Chattanooga and Richmond. The story of his months with the soldiers is a thrilling one. Day after day he stood before great companies of men A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 89 on the eve of battle, kindling them with his own ardor for the Lord of hosts; appealing to them to enroll themselves in the army of the Son of God. “ Crowds and crowds turned out to hear him,” says General Howard, with whose command he served for some time. “ He showed them how a soldier could give his heart to God. His preaching was direct and effective, and multitudes responded with a promise to follow Christ.” And when the battle was over, and the hospital tents were filled with broken and dying men, Moody was always there, gentle of touch and voice, bringing comfort and peace wherever he went. After the war had ended Moody went back to his work in Chicago. In 1863, in spite of Mr. Moody’s strong advice to the contrary, the North Market Hall Sunday School had been organized into a permanent church, known as the Illinois Street Church. Moody felt that it was unwise to multiply organizations, and urged the people to join some church in the neighborhood, but when he saw that the new church was inevitable, he gave him- self whole-heartedly to its work. The church was open every evening of the week, and Mr. Moody was there practically every night, often leading the evan- gelistic meetings himself. His work in the army had made him known to a much larger circle of people than before, and he was in great demand for work in the Young Men’s Christian Asso- ciation and at Sunday-school conventions, but he still received some very frank criticisms, and still met them 90 COMRADES IN SERVICE in the humble, teachable spirit which the earnest young beginner had shown. At one of the conventions at which he spoke, one of the speakers who followed him commented very unfavorably on his address, saying that it was merely a collection of newspaper clippings and the like. When this critic sat down, Mr. Moody rose and said that he knew that the criticisms which had just been made were true, that he recognized his lack of education and his inability to make a fine address, and wanted to thank the speaker for pointing out his short-comings, and to pray that God would help him to do better. Very few people ever saw any evidence of the hot temper which was a part of Dwight L. Moody’s natural endowment, but once in a long time when he was tried beyond endurance it would flash out sud- denly. One evening, after a very earnest meeting, Mr. Moody was standing at the door of the room where the inquiry meeting was to be held, urging the men to come in. The door to this room was on the lower landing of the stairway, at the head of a short flight, and as Moody stood there a man came up to him and deliberately insulted him. Mr. Moody would never repeat the insult, but it was such as to make him thrust the man from him so violently as to send him reeling down the stairway. The man was not hurt, but Moody’s repentance was instant. A friend who was there, says: “ When I saw Mr. Moody give way to his temper, although I could not but believe the provocation was A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 9i extraordinary, I said to myself, ‘ This meeting is killed. The large number who have seen the whole thing will hardly be in a condition to be influenced by anything more Mr. Moody may say to-night.’ But before Moody began the second meeting that night he rose, and with trembling voice made a humble apology. “ * Friends,’ he said, ‘ before beginning to-night I want to confess that I yielded just now to my temper, out in the hall, and have done wrong. Just as I was coming in here to-night I lost my temper with a man, and I want to confess my wrong before you all, and if that man is present here whom I thrust away from me in anger I want to ask his forgiveness and God’s. — Let us pray.’ “ There was not a word of excuse or vindication for resenting the insult. The impression made by his words was wonderful, and instead of the meeting be- ing killed by the scene, it was greatly blessed by such a consistent and straightforward confession.” In 1867 and 1872 Mr. Moody visited England, the first trip being made chiefly in the interest of his wife’s health, and the second one for the purpose of doing some Bible study under the guidance of English pro- fessors. Neither visit was a long one, but Moody made a host of friends, three of whom, the Rev. William Pennefather, Mr. Cuthbert Bainbridge, and Mr. Henry Bewley, strongly urged him to come to Great Britain in 1873, for a series of evangelistic meetings, promis- ing to meet all his traveling expenses and those of his party. The work in Chicago was in such a condition 92 COMRADES IN SERVICE that Mr. Moody felt able to leave it, and he and his family, with Mr. Sankey, whose singing was an im- portant part of the evangelistic campaign, sailed for Liverpool in June, 1873. They were somewhat sur- prised that the money for their traveling expenses did not reach them before they sailed, as had been arranged, but when they reached Liverpool they under- stood. A letter was awaiting them, telling them that all three of the friends who had promised to plan and finance this visit in Great Britain had suddenly died. “ God seems to have closed the doors/’ Mr. Moody said to Mr. Sankey. “ We will not open any our- selves. If he opens the door we will go in; other- wise we will return to America.” That night, in the hotel at Liverpool, Mr. Moody found in his pocket an unopened letter which he had re- ceived just before sailing. He found that it was from the secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association of York, England, telling him that he had heard of his work among young men in America, and that he hoped if he ever came to England he would come to York. “ The door is only ajar,” Mr. Moody exclaimed, “ but we will consider the letter as God’s hand leading to York, and we will go there.” Mr. Moody arrived in York Saturday morning, and began his meetings on Sunday. It was summer-time, there had been no time for preparation, and the secre- tary of the Young Men’s Christian Association was practically the only person in York who had ever heard A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 93 of Mr. Moody. But after the first week the meetings grew steadily and rapidly, in both attendance and in- terest, and attracted much attention throughout Eng- land. After five weeks of meetings in York, during which several hundreds professed their purpose to become Christians, Mr. Moody accepted an invita- tion to Sunderland, where the meetings were even larger than those in York. The meetings in Sunder- land were followed by several weeks of very successful work in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in November Mr. Moody began ten weeks of meetings in Edinburgh. Early in February, work was begun in Glasgow. The interest in the meetings and the response to them were everywhere overwhelming. During the following year Mr. Moody conducted similar meetings in Belfast, Londonderry, Dublin, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Liverpool, everywhere preaching to enormous, eager audiences, and everywhere winning thousands to allegiance to his Master. In March, 1875, he began his four months’ campaign in London, the largest city of the world, and in many respects one of the most difficult in which to hold such services. Most careful preparation had been made for this campaign, and a large and earnest com- mittee worked closely with Mr. Moody all through it. The first meeting was held in Agricultural Hall, which was filled with eager listeners throughout the months of Mr. Moodv’s work in London, and a second place of meeting, the Bow Road Hall, on the east side of London, was also packed every night. 94 COMRADES IN SERVICE “ The preaching begins at eight o’clock/’ an Amer- ican who was in London during these meetings wrote home. “ At half past seven every chair in the hall is filled. Late comers, who cannot be packed upon the platform, or find standing-room out of range of those who are seated, are turned away by the policemen at the entrances. ... A Christian cannot look into the faces of this serious, hushed, expectant audience of eight or ten thousand people without being deeply moved by the thought of the issues that may hang on this hour. Hundreds, if not thousands of them have come from other quarters of the city, from five to ten miles away. They sit so closely packed that the men wear their hats. Ushers, carrying their tall rods of office, are thickly scattered along the entrances and aisles. ... At the close of the address, which was something less than an hour long, those who wished to become Christians were invited to stand up; and sev- eral hundred arose.” “ Nothing is clearer than that London has been re- markably stirred by the labors of these two evangel- ists,” the same American wrote. “ The windows of every print store are hung with their pictures. Penny editions of Mr. Sankey’s songs are hawked about the streets. The stages and the railway stations are placarded to catch the travelers for their meetings. The papers report their services with a fulness never dreamed of before in giving account of religious meetings.” During his four months in London, Mr. Moody A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 95 held 285 meetings, which it was estimated were at- tended by approximately 2,530,000 people. During the first winter after his return to America, in 1875, h e conducted campaigns in Brooklyn, Phila- delphia, and New York, all of which were very largely attended and most successful in every way. They not only reached vast numbers of people; they also touched all kinds of people. A newspaper reported of the New York meetings: “ In the Hippodrome Mr. Moody has gathered day by day the largest audiences ever seen in this city. Lawyers, bankers, merchants, some of whom scarcely ever enter a church, are just as much a part of his congregations as are the second- rate and the third-rate boarding-house people men- tioned so conspicuously in a recent analysis. All classes and conditions of men have been represented in these great revival meetings.” “ Whatever philosophical skeptics may say,” said the New York Times , after the meetings in the Hippo- drome had closed, “ the work accomplished this winter by Mr. Moody in this city for private and public morals will live. The drunken have become sober, the vicious virtuous, the worldly and self-seeking unselfish, the ignoble noble, the impure pure, the youth have started with more generous aims, the old have been stirred from grossness. A new hope has lifted up hundreds of human beings, a new consolation has come to the sorrowful, and a better principle has entered the sordid life of the day through the labors of these plain men. Whatever the prejudiced may say against 96 COMRADES IN SERVICE them, the honest-minded and just will not forget their labors of love/' Five great campaigns in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Boston were the beginning of Mr. Moody’s evangelistic work in America, to which he gave almost all his time until his death in 1899. He visited all the leading cities in the United States and Canada, from north to south and from east to west, sometimes spending an entire winter in con- centrated work in one city. He never lost his power. When in 1897, two years before he was forced to lay down his work, he conducted a series of meetings in the Auditorium, the largest building in Chicago, with a seating capacity of six thousand, the Chicago Times- Herald reported of the opening meeting: “ It made a scene without precedent. Six thou- sand more men and women were standing in the streets after the management had ordered the doors closed. This multitude would not accept the announcement that the vast hall was packed from ceiling to pit. It swept around the corners and in the avenues until traffic was blocked. The cable cars could not get past. ... A line of policemen tried to argue, but the crowd would not be reasoned with. An hour before the time for opening there had been a stampede. Then men at the entrances were swept from their posts by the tide. The overflow waited patiently during the service, and a small fraction of it was able to get inside after Mr. Moody had finished his sermon.” When his campaigns for the year were over, Mr. A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 97 Moody turned, like a boy from school, to his old home in the little village of Northfield. His son says: “ Nothing was more characteristic of Mr. Moody than his longing for retirement in the country from the press of his work. Though his life-work lay for the most part in great cities, he was born a country lad, and for him the ‘ everlasting hills ’ possessed a wealth of meaning and a marvelous recuperative power. Some instinct drew him back to the soil, some mysterious prompting impelled him to solitude, away from the crowds that absorbed so much of his strength; then, after a little respite, he would return with new strength and new vitality.’’ One day not long after Mr. Moody had returned to Northfield to live, he and his younger brother drove past a lonely cottage on one of the mountain roads, far from any neighbor or town. The mother and two daughters of the family were sitting in the doorway braiding the straw hats by the sale of which they supported themselves and the helpless paralyzed hus- band and father. The father was an educated man, and the daughters were eager for an opportunity to learn how to do other things than braiding straw hats, but what chance was there for them, in that out-of-the- way place, to go to school ? Mr. Moody kept thinking about these girls, and other girls like them, scattered through the hills of New England, and talked to his friends about them, until in 1878 he had collected enough money to purchase land for a boarding-school where girls from families of small means could re- 98 COMRADES IN SERVICE ceive a thorough Christian education. In 1879 a ci- tation hall large enough to accommodate one hundred students was built, and in 1880 ground was broken for the first dormitory. To-day the alumnae of North- field Seminary are in positions of influence all over the world. Almost before the work at Northfield Seminary was well under way, Mr. Moody began to plan for a similar school for boys. His friends responded as generously to his appeal on behalf of the boys as they had to that for the girls, and for almost thirty-five years the Mount Hermon School has meant to young men what Northfield Seminary, three miles away, has meant to young women. In Chicago there is another school established by Mr. Moody, and bearing his name — the Moody Bible Institute. One summer soon after Mr. Moody began his evan- gelistic campaign in America, he invited a group of Christian workers to come to Northfield for ten days of prayer and conference together. From that beginning thirty- five years ago have grown the six big Christian Conferences which every summer bring together at Northfield men and women, young and old, from almost every part of the world. In November of 1899, Mr. Moody was preaching every day to great throngs of men and women who crowded the Convention Hall of Kansas City. He had never preached with greater power, and never seemed more joyous in his work. “ I have no sympathy with the idea that our best ROUND TOP A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 99 days are behind us,” he declared to his audience one night, and chuckled as he told them how he had felt when he saw in the newspapers that “ old Moody was in town.” “ Why,” he said, “ I am only sixty-two; I am only a baby in comparison with the great eternity which is to come ! ” But the friends who were watching him closely saw that he seemed ill, and that, although he showed no signs of weakness while he was preaching, each service left him more exhausted than the one before. Finally they insisted that he go home, and reluctantly he left the campaign in the hands of others, and went back to his boyhood home among the hills of Northfield. There, on the day after Christmas, they laid him to rest on Round Top, in the heart of the school he had founded, on the hill made sacred to thousands by the “ Round Top meetings ” of the conferences he had established. In far-away China, a young father brought his baby son to the missionary for baptism, and asked that the little boy be given the name “ Moo Dee.” The missionary had never heard a Chinese name like that, and after the baptism questioned the father about its origin. “ I have heard of your man of God, Moody,” the father told him. “ In our dialect Moo means love, and Dee , God. I would have my child, too, love God.” A BELOVED PHYSICIAN How I long to live a life like Christ’s, full of sacrifice and — LI BI CU A BELOVED PHYSICIAN When the missionary in charge of the Foochow or- phanage opened the door one morning, several years ago, she found a little bundle of rags lying beside it. Inside the rags was a wee baby girl, whose parents had felt that the burden of another girl-child was too much for them to carry. So the missionary took the baby into the orphanage, and kept her there until she had grown up into a strong, educated, Christian young woman. Then she married Mr. Li, a graduate of the theological school of Foochow, and went with him into a lonely little mountain village, where there was a tiny Methodist church. While they were work- ing in this village their first child was born, a baby girl, little Bi Cu, who was not left on any one else’s doorstep, but was welcomed with a feast of rejoicing to which all the church-members were invited ; for she had come to a Christian home where baby girls were as dearly loved as little sons. As soon as Li Bi Cu was old enough she was sent to the boarding-school for girls at Hinghwa, and while she was there did such good work that her mis- sionary friends wished that she might have a chance for further study. So when Mrs. Brewster was going back to America on her furlough she wrote to friends IOI 102 COMRADES IN SERVICE asking whether money for Li Bi Cu’s education could be provided if she were to bring her home with her. A cablegram brought the answer, “ Yes,” and when Mrs. Brewster landed in America in May of 1897, Li Bi Cu was with her. With no knowledge of the English language, and very little preparation in the subjects which were a prerequisite to the medical course which she planned to take, Li Bi Cu began at the very beginning in the primary classes of the public school at Herkimer, New York. She worked untiringly, through term time and vacation time, and took the two years’ course in Folts Mission Institute after leaving the public school. In the autumn of 1901, four years after her arrival in America, she was ready to enter the Woman’s Medi- cal College of Philadelphia. The work here was not easy, but Li Bi Cu was a faithful student. Her interne work often took her into the most unpleasant sections of the city, where it was hard for an American woman to work, and doubly so for a Chinese. But she never shrank from any test, nor asked that she should be treated in any different way from the other students because of the disadvantages under which she worked as a foreigner. While in the medical college Li Bi Cu came in con- tact with the type of student who refuses to believe anything which cannot be proved by a scientific for- mula. Some of them told her that the religion which her parents and the missionaries had taught her was no longer believed by any intelligent person in Amer- A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 103 ica, but was simply an old tradition which educated people did not accept. To be told this by students who had been born and brought up in a Christian coun- try was a severe trial for this little Chinese girl, so far away from her family and her teachers. But she faced her struggle quietly. One of the student secretaries of the National Young Women’s Christian Association of America was making a visit to the medical college about this time, and to her Li Bi Cu came with her story of what some of the students had been saying to her. “ Do you think that what they said was true ? ” the secretary asked her. “ I thought I would wait until you came,” Li Bi Cu answered. “ You know students. You will tell me the truth.” “ But what did you think about it yourself? ” “ I thought, I will watch those students,” Li Bi Cu replied. “ I will see what they have to give me that my missionaries have not given me.” “ And what did you find ? ” “ They have nothing to give,” was Li Bi Cu’s ver- dict. She had tested her faith by her Master’s own standard. By their fruits she had known. Dr. Li graduated from the Woman’s Medical Col- lege with high honors in 1905, and returned to China in September of that year. Before she left America she was received by President Roosevelt, who extended special courtesies to her, and talked with her of her plans for work in China. She treated her first patient 104 COMRADES IN SERVICE even before she reached the coast; for on the way to San Francisco the train on which she was traveling ran over a Russian track laborer, seriously injuring him. He was carried into the baggage car, and there Dr. Li stopped the violent hemorrhage from which he was suffering, and made him as comfortable as pos- sible until the train reached a station from which he could be taken to a hospital. Dr. Li had been away from China for over eight years w T hen she returned, and the joy of her home- coming is the dominant note of the first letter sent back to America : “ I was indeed happy when the little steam launch landed at Foochow. My father came about eighteen miles to meet me. He did not look a day older to me. Of course we began to talk our native language at once, but my tongue would not twist properly. How my father did laugh ! By the time we got to the end of the eighteen miles I was able to speak a little better. My dear mother was at the girls’ boarding-school awaiting me. She stood at the door nearly all the morning wait- ing for me. I cannot tell you how I felt. I only knew I was happy. “ I was in about two hours when many people came to see me, for Miss Bonafield had planned a reception for me. We had a lovely time together. Several of the missionaries sang and played. I enjoyed every part except the part I took. They asked me to speak a few words. I do not think I was ever so frightened A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 105 as I was at that time, because they hardly gave me time to collect my thoughts. “ I spent a week in Foochow to have my ancient style changed. I told my friends that it is a pity we do not publish a Delineator in China, so that those who return from other countries may not be so noticeable on the streets.” During the few days which Dr. Li spent in Foochow she not only had her “ ancient style changed ” but also improved the opportunity of visiting the hospitals of the city, that she might see how hospitals in the climate of southern China were constructed and cared for. She and her parents also made a visit to Ngu Cheng, a com- paratively new station of the mission, where it was proposed that the young physician should carry on medical work. There she was greeted enthusiastically by the firing of hundreds of firecrackers. After a short stay, which was however long enough to impress her with the need of medical work there, she went to Hinghwa. Her own words shall tell of her return to her home city : “ We had a complete family reunion. The people there met me with banners, firecrackers, and music. I felt very strange to have such a demonstration. I had hoped to get into the city quietly, but I could not help it. There was a very large crowd because the Hinghwa Conference was in session. My dear brothers and sisters have grown much. My youngest sister, whom I have never seen, went about a mile with others to meet me. As soon as she saw me she ran to meet io6 COMRADES IN SERVICE me and came into my [sedan] chair. She is only five years old, and she is just as sweet as she can be. My oldest brother prepared a feast for us, so we had a very happy reunion.” After eight years’ absence from her native land, Dr. Li found that she had almost forgotten how much need there was. Had she needed a further incentive to her work as a physician, the constant appeal made to her sympathetic heart by the suffering all about her would have supplied it. “ Oh, dear Mrs. S she wrote to a friend, a few weeks after her return, “ I did not know half about China when I was in America. The condition is worse than I thought.” In another letter written about the same time, she said, “ I cannot tell you how I felt when I stepped into a sedan-chair. I was so sad and so sorry for my fellow men who had to carry me. I wished I were only ten pounds then, so that they might not have to carry such a load. The streets seem narrower than when I left home, but I suppose it is because I have seen wider ones and cleaner ones since. I never saw so many people on the streets as I saw in Foochow. That day I saw a blind woman and a child who were leading each other. How my heart ached for them. They were begging at every store, but they were being knocked about by the crowd.” Dr. Li was appointed to Ngu Cheng at the Hinghwa Conference, and after a very brief stay with the family from which she had been so long separated, she eagerly began her work there. “ My stay at home is short,” A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 107 she admitted, “ but I feel that I must go and see about the building at once. The people will be glad to work until Chinese New Year, then they will want to stop, so I can come home and visit with my people at that time.” One of her letters gives a glimpse of her impres- sions of Ngu Cheng: “ Ngu Cheng is not very large itself, but there are numberless villages within our reach. The place is near the ocean and therefore very windy. The hills are destitute of trees, but there are many huge rocks. The fields are wide and very abundant, but the earth is not fertile, so they do not give good increase, consequently the people are miser- ably poor. These people have very little education of any kind, most of them have none.” Dr. Li rented a Chinese house to serve until the new hospital building could be erected, and began work at once. Ngu Cheng was not an easy place in which to work. The missionary work was comparatively new; the city was too far away from any large center to have been touched and enlightened by foreign influence ; and the poverty and ignorance of the people made work for them very difficult. In her first annual report Dr. Li admitted : “ When I first came there was cause for discouragement ; for there were few patients and they expected to be healed after the first dose. When called to their homes one is sure to see a dying case, or one which is given up as hopeless by their own doctors.” Yet she soon gained the confidence of the people, and io8 COMRADES IN SERVICE in her first five months of work eight hundred patients were treated. For her first year’s work she reported 2,905 patients in the dispensary, 143 visits, and 150 ward patients, with one death in the hospital, that of a child who was in the last stages of disease and exhaustion when brought there. “ This is only the experimental year,” she said, “ so I hope next year the work will be more successful.” But the verdict of her coworkers was : “ Her fitness and adaptability are a delight to her mis- sionary friends, while they greatly rejoice over her influence in evangelistic efforts.” Of this phase of her work Dr. Li wrote