one]

DR. MARY STONE

I

WITH UNBOUND FEET

On the "first day of the third moon" of the year 1873, a young Chinese
father knelt by the side of his wife and, with her, reverently consecrated
to the service of the Divine Father the little daughter who had that day
been given them. They named her "Maiyue,"--"Beautiful Gem"--and together
agreed that this perfect gift should never be marred by the binding of the
little feet. It was unheard of! Even the servant women of Kiukiang would
have been ashamed to venture outside the door with unbound feet, and the
very beggar women hobbled about on stumps of three and four inches in
length. No little girl who was not a slave had ever been known to grow up
with natural feet before, in all Central or West China. That the descendant
of one of the proudest and most aristocratic families of China, whose
genealogical records run back without a break for a period of two thousand
years, little Shih Maiyue, should be the first to thus violate the
century-old customs of her ancestors, was almost unbelievable.

Even the missionaries could not credit it, not even Miss Howe, whose
interest in the family was peculiarly keen, since Maiyue's mother was the
first fruits of her work for Chinese women, and had ever since been working
with her. To be sure Mrs. Shih had said to her, "If the Lord gives me a
little daughter I shall not bind her feet." But Miss Howe had made so many
efforts to induce the women and girls with whom she had worked to take off
the crippling bandages, without having been successful in a single
instance, that she did not build her hopes on this. One day, when calling
in the home and seeing little Maiyue, then five years old, playing about the
room, she remarked, "My dear Mrs. Shih, you will not make a good job of it
unless you begin at once to bind little Maiyue's feet." But Mrs. Shih never
faltered in the purpose which she and her husband had formed at the little
girl's birth, and promptly answered, "Did I not tell you I should not bind
her feet?"

The first years of Maiyue's life were unusually happy ones. Her father was a
pastor in the Methodist church, and had charge of the "Converting to
Holiness" chapel in Kiukiang; her mother was successfully conducting a day
school for girls. From her mother Maiyue received much of her earliest
instruction and before she was eight years old she had studied several of
the Chinese classics and memorized the Gospel of Matthew a