and then she was wrapped up
carefully again and taken home. Surely no one present ever dreamed how
much good little Mary would one day do for Africa.

It was not a very fine house into which Mary had been born, for her
father, who was a shoemaker, did not earn much money; but her mother, a
sweet and gentle woman, worked hard to keep it clean and tidy, and love
makes even the poorest place sunshiny and warm. When Mary was able to
run about she played a great deal with her brother Robert, who was older
than she, but she liked to help her mother too: indeed she seemed to be
fonder of doing things for others than for herself. She did not need
dolls, for more babies came into the home, and she used to nurse them
and dress them and hush them to sleep.

She was very good at make-believe, and one of her games was to sit in a
corner and pretend that she was keeping school. If you had listened to
her you would have found that the pupils she was busy teaching and
keeping in order were children with skins as black as coal. The reason
was this: Her mother took a great interest in all she heard on Sundays
about the dark lands beyond the seas where millions of people had never
heard of Jesus. The church to which she belonged, the United
Presbyterian Church, had sent out many brave men and women to various
parts of the world to fight the evils of heathenism, and a new Mission
had just begun amongst a savage race in a wild country called Calabar in
West Africa, and every one in Scotland was talking about it and the
perils and hardships of the missionaries. Mrs. Slessor used to come home
with all the news about the work, and the children would gather about
her knees and listen to stories of the strange cruel customs of the
natives, and how they killed the twin-babies, until their eyes grew big
and round, and their hearts raced with fear, and they snuggled close to
her side.

Mary was very sorry for these helpless bush-children, and often thought
about them, and that was why she made them her play-scholars. She
dreamed, too, of going out some day to that terrible land and saving the
lives of the twinnies, and sometimes she would look up and say:

"Mother, I want to be a missionary and go out and teach the black boys
and girls--real ways."

Then Robert would retort in the tone that boys often use to their
sisters:

"But you're only a girl, and girls can't be missionaries. _I'm_ going to
be one and you can come out with me, and if yo