hands and his fingers, and finally decided that, in spite of his
queer looks, he was after all a man.

From that day the young missionary and the herd-boys were great friends.
Every day he joined them in the buffalo pasture, and would spend from
four to five hours with them. And as they were very willing to talk,
he not only learned their language rapidly, but also learned much about
their homes, their schools, their customs, and their religion.

One day, after a lengthy lesson from his servant, the latter decided
that the barbarian was unbearable, and bundling up his clothes he
marched off, without so much as "by your leave." So Mackay fell back
entirely upon his little teachers on the common. With their assistance
in the daytime and his Chinese-English dictionary at night, he made
wonderful progress.

He was left alone now, to get his own meals and keep the swarms of flies
and the damp mold out of his hut by the riverside. He soon learned to
eat rice and water-buffalo meat, but he missed the milk and butter and
cheese of his old Canadian home. For he discovered that cows were never
milked in Formosa. There was variety of food, however, as almost every
kind of vegetable that he had ever tasted and many new kinds that he
found delicious were for sale in the open-fronted shops in the village.
Then the fruits! They were fresh at all seasons--oranges the whole year,
bananas fresh from the fields--and such pineapples! He realized that he
had never really tasted pineapples before.

Meanwhile, he was becoming acquainted. All the families of the herd-boys
learned to like him, and when others came to know him they treated him
with respect. He was a teacher, they learned, and in China a teacher is
always looked upon with something like reverence. And, besides, he had
a beard. This appendage was considered very honorable among Chinese, so
the black-bearded barbarian was respected because of this.

But there was one class that treated him with the greatest scorn. These
were the Chinese scholars. They were the literati, and were like princes
in the land. They despised every one who was not a graduate of their
schools, and most of all they despised this barbarian who dared to set
himself up as a teacher. Mackay had now learned Chinese well enough
to preach, and his sermons aroused the indignation of these proud
graduates.

Sometimes when one was passing the little hut by the river, he would
drop in, and glance around just to s