rmation. Perhaps, as a child, I was taken to too many missionary
meetings, with their atmosphere of hot tea and sentiment, and heard
too much of "my dear brothers and sisters in the mission field," for
I grieve to say, before I came to India, I quite actively disliked
missionaries and thought them a feeble folk. Mother was the only kind
of missionary I liked. She has a mission--so we tell her--to the
dreary people of this world. Not the very poor--they are vastly
entertaining--but the not-very-rich, highly respectable, deadly dull
people, with awkward, unlovable manners, whom no one cares very much
to visit or to ask to things, and who must often feel very lonely and
neglected. While others are taken up with more entertaining company
Mother has time to trot to these people with a new book or magazine,
or merely to talk for half an hour in the funny bright way which is
like no one else's way; has them to the house to meet interesting
people (in spite of the remonstrant groans of the family), and having
brought them does not neglect them, but draws them out till they seem
quite brilliant, and they go away warmed and enlivened by their social
success.

Even the most determined distruster of missions couldn't stay long at
Takai without being converted. Dr. Russel, very far from being feeble,
is a most able man, who would have made his mark in his profession at
home; but he prefers healing the bodies and saving the souls of the
Santals in the jungle, to building up a lucrative practice, and even
attaining the dizzy height of a knighthood.

To heal their poor neglected bodies; to be the first to tell them of
Jesus--how did Festus put it?--"one Jesus, which is dead, whom Paul
affirmed to be alive"; to teach them, to help and raise them until
life becomes for these natives a new and undreamed-of thing--one can
see how fine it is, how soul-satisfying!

Dr. Russel has built a hospital, and the natives come from far and
near bringing their sick. As I sit here writing, they come trooping
past, taking a short cut past the bungalow, stopping to stare at me
quite unabashed, sometimes carrying a sick child, sometimes a blind
old man or woman. They know they can come at any time and the Padre
Sahib will never tell them to go away. It is different with a
Government official. He is hedged round by _chuprassis_ who levy toll
on the poor natives before they allow them to enter the presence of
the Sahib. It is a scandal, but it seems impo