enabled us to
accompany him. Government roads are one thing; native roads are quite
another. Sudden descents to fordable streams and sudden ascents to the
opposite banks are succeeded by long stretches of passage through
cultivated fields, where there appears no sign of road at all. At last
we reached the village of Naletur. Under the shadow of a great tree we
found at least a thousand people assembled, sitting on the ground
bordered by a broad fringe of men and women standing on the outside, and
supplemented by a score of half-naked Zaccheus-like hearers perched in
the branches of the trees. Mrs. Baker, awaiting the coming of her
husband and his guests, had been holding this motley audience for two
hours with selections from the gramophone, with illustrated Scripture
lessons and pictures from the Life of Christ, and by calling on her
"band" for "music" with a big drum, castanets, cymbals, and various
other instruments of Indian manipulation. Salvation Army methods have
great influence over a childlike people, and Mrs. Baker would make, in
case of necessity, a first-class Salvation Army lassie. In fact, no act
of missionary humility has struck our eyes as more pathetic and true,
than that of Mrs. Baker, beating a big drum to the time of native music,
in order to hold an audience for the hearing of the gospel. The
amphitheater of dusky faces, massed together and intently listening,
with Christians on one side and heathen on the other, seemed like a
reproduction of the days "when Jesus was here among men," and a
prophecy of the great final Day when our Lord, the Judge, will separate
the sheep from the goats.

That evening we left the grove and entered the village with fife and
drum, attracting auditors, and held a torchlight meeting in the
market-place. There was preaching, and the chanting, in rhythm but not
rhyme, of a versified story of the life of Christ. The missionaries
make much of this sort of Telugu singing. There was the same crowd of
auditors that had met us in the afternoon, but now the intermittent
light of the torches made the scene seem to be flashing rays of
conviction into many a troubled breast, and I wished that some great
painter could immortalize the picture upon canvas, for no one can
understand missions to the heathen without picturing to himself such
preaching.

The next morning, on our way back to Ongole, we visited the famous spot
on the river bank at Vellumpilly where, in 1878, 2,222 believers