of the days of the martyrs; stories of Chinese
Christian converts butchered like sheep by their infuriated fellow
countrymen. When the Pei-tang, in another part of the city, was
finally rescued by foreign troops, the surviving Christians and
missionaries were dying of starvation; they had become mere wan,
half-crazed skeletons, subsisting on roots and bark.

The heroism shown by many of the Chinese Christian converts {126}
during this Boxer uprising has enriched the history not only of the
church, but of mankind; for what man of us is not inspired to worthier
things by every high deed of martyrdom which a fellowman anywhere has
suffered? Into the Pei-tang the Boxers hurled arrow after arrow with
letters attached offering immunity to the Chinese converts if they
would abandon their Christian leaders, but not even starvation led one
to desert. Colonel Denby estimated that in the whole empire 15,000
Chinese Christians were butchered and that only 2 per cent of them
abandoned their faith. A missionary told me the other day of one
family who took refuge in a cave, but when finally smoked out by
suffocating flames, refused life at the cost of denying their Master,
and went to death singing a hymn in Chinese, "Jesus Is Leading Me." At
Taiyan-fu an especially touching incident occurred: Five or six young
girls, just in their teens, were about to be killed, when a leader
intervened, declaring: "It is a pity to slaughter mere children," and
urged them to recant. Their only answer was: "Kill us quickly, since
that is your purpose; we shall not change." And they paid for their
faith with their lives.

I am writing this down on the Yangtze-Kiang (Kiang means river in
Chinese), having boarded a steamer at Hankow, the famous Chinese
industrial centre, about 600 miles south of Peking. About Hankow I
found farming much more primitive than that around Peking, Nankou, and
Tientsin. Instead of the three and four horse plows I found in North
China, the plowmen about Hankow seem to rely chiefly on a single ox.
The farms, too, are much smaller. No one here speaks of buying a
"farm"; he buys a "field." In Kwang-tung there is a saying that one
sixth of an acre "will support one mouth." As nearly as I can find
out, the average wages paid farm laborers is about 10 cents (gold) a
day. The average for all kinds of labor, a member of the Emperor's
Grand Council tells me, is about 35 to 38 cents Mexican, or 15 to 18
cents gold a day.

In forming