scussion, he harboured no bitterness of feeling against his opponents.
After excited argument he would get up and say, "Nevertheless I love
you." Nor were these empty words. He was kind, and willing to help all,
and was doing acts of service continually for those who opposed him
most.'

Towards the close of 1878 the Rev. J. S. Barradale, of the Tientsin
Mission, died, leaving the Rev. J. Lees alone without a Chinese-speaking
helper. Mr. Gilmour sympathised deeply with him in his loss, and wrote
to say that, so long as Mr. Lees was thus left alone, he would be glad
to make two trips annually to his country stations, either _with_ him or
_for_ him. Mr. Gilmour's journal of this work is not only a record of
the willingness with which he added gladly to his own heavy labours in
order to assist a colleague; but it also gives some most realistic
pictures of what ordinary life in China is like, and under what
conditions evangelistic itineration there is carried on. Some of the
districts visited had just been devastated by a severe famine.

'From Tientsin to Hsiao Chang is five days' journey. Three hours
out from Tientsin we came upon some dogs feasting on a corpse lying
at a cross-road. The dogs belonged to cottagers near, but no
attempt was made by the owners to keep them away; no one took the
trouble to bury the body or cover it up even. Later on we passed
through one famine-devastated district. Half the houses in the
villages were unroofed; large tracts of land were untilled; the
landscape was almost entirely destitute of animal life; travellers
were nowhere to be seen; round the villages the little stacks of
straw and fuel were not to be seen; the lanes were silent; no dogs,
no cocks and hens, no pigs; no groups of children playing or
running after the foreigner as he passed by; and the words of
Scripture came to my mind, "the land desolate without inhabitant."
We continued to pass these desolations for about sixty English
miles. We stopped a night in one of these ruined villages, and Mr.
Lees took me round the place to see the nature and extent of the
destruction. Closer inspection revealed even more ruin than a mere
traveller's passing look would detect; for, evidently, some care
had been taken to leave house walls and boundary walls on the
street standing, so as to hide some part of the destruction, and
thus make th