el said, "I was an Epworthian, too, and in the
young women's missionary societies. We had a combination society in our
church, so I was a 'Queen Esther' and a 'Standard Bearer' as well. Those
organizations did me a world of good. You know, when I think of it, the
women's missionary societies have done a wonderful work in America and
everywhere."

"I guess they have," said J.W. "I know my mother has always been a
member of both, and she's always been the most intelligent and active
missionary in the Farwell family."

The talk languished for a while, and then Miss Morel exclaimed, "I know
why we've stopped talking; we're hungry. It is almost time for luncheon,
and if you have an appetite like mine, you're impatient for the call."

J.W. looked at his watch and saw that there was only ten minutes of the
morning left. So they separated to get ready against the sounding of the
dinner gong.

But J.W. was not hungry. He was struggling with an old thought that to
him had all the tantalizing quality of novelty. The talk of the morning
had become a sort of roll-call of church boards. How did it happen that
the church was busy with this and that and the other work? Why a Board
of Hospitals and Homes? Why a Deaconess Board, even though deaconess
work happened to be merciful and gentle and Christlike? What was the
church doing with a Book Concern? How came it that we had that board
with the long name--Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals? He had
traveled from Yokohama to Lucknow and back, and everywhere he had found
this same church doing all sorts of work, with no slightest suspicion
but that all of it was her proper business.

So picture after picture flickered before his mind's eye, as though his
brain had built up a five-reel mental movie from all sorts of memory
film; a hundred feet of this, two hundred of that, a thousand here,
there just a flash. It had all one common mark; it was all "the church,"
but the hit-and-miss of it, its lightning change, bewildered him. The
pictures leaped from Cartwright to Cawnpore, from the country church at
Ellis to Joe Carbrook's hospital in China; from New York and
Philadelphia and Chicago and Cincinnati and Washington to the ends of
the country and the ends of the earth; and in and through it all, swift
bits of unrelated yet vivid hints of _Advocates_ and _Heralds_, of
prayer meetings and institutes, of new churches and old colleges, of
revivals and sewing societies, of League socia