nd was very grateful indeed to us
for a comfortable bed and a good meal. The operation was successful,
and resulted in her obtaining good sight in that eye. But meanwhile
someone had frightened her, telling her that hell would be her
punishment for listening to our teaching. She wept very much, and
refused to allow us to operate on the other eye or listen to any more
of our "wicked religion." We saw no more of her for about four months,
when she appeared one day in our out-patient department in great pain
from suppuration of the second eye. She had been to some charlatan,
who, in operating on it, had completely destroyed the vision of that
eye, and she had suffered so much that she was only too glad to put
herself again under our treatment. The second eye had to be removed,
but she is able to work, as the sight of the first is good, and she
often comes to us now and listens to the teaching, although she still
says: "Your medicine is very good, but your religion is wicked." Yet
in listening to the Gospel story she finds some solace in the great
sorrow which has so clouded the life of poor "Beautiful Pearl."

If some of our medical ladies and nurses in England saw how their
poor Afghan sisters suffered, often in silence and hopelessness,
would not some of them come out to do the work of Christ and bear His
name among them? "I was sick, and ye visited me." Though till now we
have only had a man doctor in Bannu, yet forty or fifty women attend
the out-patients' department nearly every day, and many of these have
undertaken long and wearisome journeys to reach us.

There are the Hindu women from Bannu city collected together in
one corner of the verandah, lest they should be polluted by contact
with the Muhammadan women from the villages. For the women are much
greater sticklers for the observance of all the niceties of Hindu
ceremonial than their more Westernized husbands, and would have to
undergo the trouble of a complete bath on returning home if they had
been in contact with anything ceremonially impure. One can recognize
the Hindu women at once by their clothes. They wear the same three
garments winter and summer--a skirt reaching down to their ankles;
a curious upper garment, like a waistcoat with no back to it; and
a veil, which falls over and covers their otherwise bare back, and
which they hurriedly pull over their faces when they see a man.

The Muhammadan women have indeed the veil, but the other garments
are