le, but, feeling that he "was having too good a
time," as he expressed it, he applied to the Board of Missions for
transfer to a more strenuous post. He obtained what he asked for, with
something over for good measure, for he was ordered to a post in the
northeastern corner of Siam, on the Annam frontier. If there is a more
remote or inaccessible spot on the map it would be hard to find it.
Here he and his wife spent ten years preaching the Word to the "black
bellied Laos," as the tattooed savages of that region are known. Then
he was transferred to Bangkok. There are no roads in Siam, so he and
his wife and their five small children made the long journey by river,
in a native dugout of less than two feet beam, in which they traveled
and ate and slept for upwards of two weeks.

I asked him if he wasn't becoming weaned of Bangkok, which, as a place
of residence, leaves much to be desired.

"Yes, I've had about enough of it," he admitted. "I'm anxious to get
away."

"Back to the Big Town?" I suggested. "To God's Country?"

"Oh, no; not back to the States," he hastened to assure me. "I haven't
finished my job out here. I want to get back to my people in the
interior again."

Whether you approve of foreign missions or not, it is impossible to
withhold your respect and admiration from such men as that. Though at
home they are too often the butts of ignorant criticisms and cheap
witticisms, they are carrying civilization, no less than Christianity,
into the world's dark places. They are the real pioneers. You might
remember this the next time an appeal is made in your church for
foreign missions.

The young Englishman was likewise an outpost of progress, though in a
different fashion. For seven years he had worn the uniform of an
officer in the Royal Navy. At the close of the war, seeing small
prospect of promotion, he had entered the employ of a British company
which held a vast timber concession in the teak forests of northern
Siam, far up, near the Chinese border. He was, he explained, a
"girdler," which meant that his duties consisted in riding through the
forest area allotted to him, selecting and girdling those trees which,
three years later, would be cut down. To girdle a tree, as everyone
knows, is to kill it, which is what is wanted, there being no market
for green teak, which warps. He remained in the forest for four weeks
at a stretch, he told me, without seeing a white man's face, his only
companions his c