bed. Never since the day that A
Hoa, his first convert, had accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior, had
he felt such joy, and all night he walked up and down in front of the
preacher's house, unable to sleep for the thankfulness to God that
surged in his heart.

Morning brought a wonderful day for the Ki-lai plain. It was like a day
when freedom from slavery was announced. Had there been bells in the
village they would certainly have been rung. But joy bells were ringing
in every heart. Nobody could work all day. The rice-fields and the shops
and the pottery works lay idle. There was but one business to do that
day, and that was to get rid of their idols.

Early in the morning the mayor of the place, or the headman as he was
called, came to the house to invite the missionary and his party to join
him. Behind him walked four big boys, carrying two large wicker baskets,
hanging from poles across their shoulders; and behind them came the
whole village, men, women, and children, their faces shining with a new
joy. The procession moved along from house to house. At every place it
stopped and out from the home were carried idols, ancestral tablets,
mock-money, flags, incense sticks, and all the stuff used in idol
worship. These were all emptied into the baskets carried by the boys.
When even the temple had been ransacked and the work of clearing out the
idols in the village was finished, the procession moved on to the next
hamlet. The villages were very near each other, so the journey was not
wearisome; and at last when every vestige of the old idolatrous life had
been taken from the homes of five villages, the happy crowd marched back
to the first village. There was a large courtyard near the temple and
here the procession halted. The boys dropped their well-filled baskets,
and their contents were piled in the center of the court. The people
gathered about the heap and with shouts of joy set fire to these signs
of their lifelong slavery. Soon the pile was blazing and crackling, and
all the people, even the chiefs of the villages, vied with each other in
burning up the idols they had so lately besought for blessings.

And then they turned toward the heathen temple and delivered it over to
Kai Bok-su for a chapel in which he and his students might preach the
gospel.

And so the temple was lighted up for a new kind of worship. It had been
used for worship many, many times before, but oh, how different it was
this time! Instea