remember once a Hindu boy
being accused of having become a Christian because he had shut his
eyes and folded his hands during the prayer. He told me that many of
the boys really joined in the prayer, and certainly they have got to
value and appreciate prayer. On a Sunday evening the boarders come to
my house to sing hymns from "Sacred Songs and Solos" and vernacular
collections, and if I omit to offer the usual prayer at the close,
they remind me of the omission; they do not wish to go away without it.

Once, at a cricket-match with a rival school, when the issue of
the game was hanging in the balance, and depended on the last man,
who had just gone in, making four runs, a Muhammadan Afghan, one of
the eleven, retired to a corner of the field and repeated the Lord's
Prayer, closing it with a petition for the victory of the school,
and returned to find the winning run just made! At meetings of the
schoolboys among themselves it is not uncommon for prayer to be
offered by one of the number, and at a farewell dinner given me in
1908 by some pupils a very beautiful and touching prayer was offered
by an old Hindu student, now reading in the Lahore Medical College,
and all the other Muhammadans, Hindus, and Christians stood up for it.

Missionaries were the first to open schools on modern lines, but at
the present time Muhammadans, Hindus, and Sikhs are endowing their own
schools and colleges on the most lavish scale, and teaching their own
religions therein, just as the mission schools teach Christianity. This
certainly has many advantages over the Government system, where
religion is ignored. His Majesty the Amir of Afghanistan is alive to
the necessity of keeping up with the times, and is founding a college
on modern lines at Kabul, which will be the first step towards the
foundation of an Afghan University. During his recent visit to India
he selected a number of trained Muhammadan graduates from Lahore and
elsewhere, who are to inaugurate the new scheme. He will, no doubt,
encounter the opposition of some of the more fanatical Mullahs, who
already look upon him as having been contaminated with many Western and
heretical ideas; but the ultimate result will be good, and the attempt
shows that even for Afghanistan a new era is approaching. Perhaps
it may not be long before a mission school at Kabul will receive the
royal sanction.

The following episode I relate in this place because it shows the
striking contrast betwee