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r own homes. "I wish I could describe to you our life in that strange inland Chinese city. We were hundreds of miles from Hong-Kong, which was the nearest British settlement, and travelling was so difficult and so slow that it took many weeks to reach the coast, and was both fatiguing and dangerous. We made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the house, half-Chinese, half-European, which had been built under my directions, and we tried to grow English seeds in our garden to remind us of the home we had left. "Three children were born to us, a boy named Edmund, and twin girls whom we christened Mary and Una, and, though we were so far away from our own native land, we managed to be a very happy little household. The woman Lao-ya was our nurse, and as devoted to the babies as if they had been her own. She would never leave them for an instant, and no trouble seemed too great for her to take on their behalf. "Among the more earnest members of our church was a man called Kan-Sou, who was a very clever carver of ivories, an art in which the Chinese excel. I had been able to cure his wife of a painful disease, and he was anxious to give me a present of some of his own work. One day, therefore, he brought me two small lockets which he had made specially for my two little girls. The exquisite threefold tracery of the border was intended, so he said, as a symbol of the doctrine of the Trinity; on one side was the Chinese equivalent for 'Good Luck', and on the other, also in Chinese characters, the names Mary and Una. He had contrived a secret spring by which the lockets would open, and had carved inside the date of the children's baptism, the entire Western part of the idea being copied from a trinket we possessed in the house, which Lao-ya had once shown him, though his rendering of it was wholly Eastern. As I found there was sufficient space in each to contain a portrait, I inserted two small photographs of my wife which I had taken myself, and coloured, and, to show our appreciation of his kindness, we tied his gifts round the babies' necks with pieces of ribbon. I believe poor Lao-ya must have considered them to be some kind of Christian charm, for she would never allow them to be taken off, and always treated them as if they were objects of veneration. "All this time the people of Tsi-chin, though regarding us with extreme suspicion, had never yet proved themselves to be absolutely hostile. When the twins were n
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