e quarrels. We spent that
night in a Wazir village, where we saw a number of patients and
made fresh friends. The head man of the village apologized next
morning for not accompanying us more than half a mile. He said that
he had blood-feuds with most of the villages round, and could not,
therefore, venture farther. The fame of the Bannu Mission Hospital,
however, was our best escort, and passport too, and we got a welcome
at almost every village we passed, through the mediation of numerous
old patients, who had recounted in all the villages the kind treatment
they had received at the hands of the feringis (Europeans) in Bannu.

Progress was somewhat delayed by frequent calls to visit a sick person
in one or another village, but openings for the Gospel were at the same
time secured, and the lessons of the parable of the Good Samaritan
imparted. By midday we reached Thal, which was for some days to be
our field hospital. Here we pitched our tents, under the shade of some
willows, by a small stream outside the town, and early the next morning
started work. A large crowd of sick and their friends had collected
from Thal itself and the villages round. I first read a passage out of
the Pashtu Testament, and explained it to them in that language. The
Gospel address over, I wrote out prescriptions for each one in order,
which my assistant dispensed to them. After a minor operation or two,
a fresh crowd had collected, another address was given, and they,
too, were seen and attended to. In this way five lots of patients were
treated, and about 200 or 300 people heard the Gospel story in their
own language. Then, as evening was drawing on, we shut up our books
and our boxes, washed off the dust of the day's work in the brook hard
by, and proceeded to interest ourselves in the operations which the
cook was conducting over an improvised fireplace, made of a couple
of bricks placed on either side of a small hole in the ground. Dinner
over, we had family prayers, and then fell soundly asleep.

An interesting town where we have sometimes stopped in our itinerations
is that of Kalabagh. It is situated on the right bank of the River
Indus where it finally breaks forth from the rocky gorge that has
hemmed it in with high, often precipitous, sides, which rise at Dimdot
to a sheer height of four hundred feet above the surging river, on
to the boundless alluvial plain of the Panjab. In some of the bends
between Attock and Kalabagh, it rushe