he quadrupled or
quintupled veils. However, the marriage was effected in a Christian way,
and the next morning there came to me an invitation to call upon the
bride. I found her to be the most beautiful Chinese girl I had ever
seen, with manners all the more pleasing because so very shy. Her
husband had prepared quarters for her which, as compared with the
average Chinese home, were almost palatial, and everything seemed to
promise a future peaceful and joyous.

After a few months the mother-in-law made her daughter a visit as she
passed through Sacramento on her way back to her native land. What
passed between mother and daughter we do not know, but a few days after
her departure, Fong Bow returning to his home was shocked to find his
little wife suspended by the neck in an attempt at suicide. He rescued
her, and when she was restored asked for the reason. She acknowledged
that she had a good home and a kind and generous husband, but there was
no shrine in the house, no ancestral tablet, no Joss, and she was
convinced that some great evil must be impending from spirits thus
neglected and provoked. She preferred to sacrifice her present comfort
rather than incur the woes approaching,--all the more dreadful in her
apprehension because utterly unknown. Whereupon Fong Bow told her that
while he himself could not worship such things, and knew that an idol
was "nothing in the world," he did not and would not forbid her to do
what she thought right, and thus she provided herself with a shrine and
gods and was comforted.

Meanwhile, the husband lived a Christian life before her, and she
herself was willing to receive instruction from Mrs. Carrington and
others. It is not improbable that she saw the difference between a home
even half Christian, like her own, and those where heathen customs made
of a husband less a protector than a lord. Doubtless she thought much in
silence before coming to the decision which changed the current of her
life. It is singular that the crisis came in consequence of her
observing at a marriage of Chinese persons making no profession of
Christian faith, the absence of the rites which had been, in her view,
the only safeguards against evil. This brought her to decision. With her
own hands she removed the shrine she had erected, and then declared her
purpose to worship her husband's God. Those who know her--both Chinese
and Americans--see in her the tokens of a real and radical change; and
it was wi