d we will follow," answered the
associates.

Notwithstanding this ebullition of energy at the outset, month after
month, nay, year after year elapsed without the least material progress.
What was termed a school would be sometimes kept up for weeks together,
at which some few children could be coaxed to come; but after the
supply of pictures, ornaments, etc., with which they had been attracted
gave out, the attendance languished and the idle urchins sought
amusement elsewhere.

Bibles were flung out with a lavish hand to men, women, and children who
had never before possessed such a treasure as a book; and this book
might for them just as well have been a bundle of old almanacs, for all
printed language was Greek to them. And they, these missionaries, did
not believe that the mere possession of the holy word of God could
impart or draw down God's grace upon the possessor; for that would be
akin to the miraculous, and they eschewed faith in miracles.

An attempt was made at expounding and hearing the word of God on
Sundays. There was good enough will in these expositions, but the ears
and the hearts for receiving were far away. People, it is true, would
come some days in crowds, but it was not for instructions; they went as
young America goes to see a band of turbaned Turks, or Barnum's latest
humbug.

Where was the use of spending so many persons' energies upon such a
stolid, indifferent, intractable people? They were wedded to their
idols, why not leave them alone? Why should they cast pearls before
swine?

These were questions the missionaries asked themselves; and answered
too, if not to their satisfaction, to the best of their ability. Their
time became more and more consumed in the care of their increasing
families.

These missionaries in their home-reports might well speak of hardships.
The women were often sick, help could but rarely be obtained, and then
of the poorest quality; thus these gentlemanly graduates of Yale,
Dartmouth, and Princeton had often not only to cook meals for the
family, but to wash, iron, attend the sick wife and helpless infants,
and suffer all the anxieties and annoyances that human flesh is heir to.
What wonder that they came gradually to lose sight of the grand
aspirations that had animated their early manhood? To forget, as it
were, the objects and aims of their holy mission, and to sink into the
mere _paterfamilias_, like other good masters of families? There seemed
no altern