The counter has been cleared away and the
shelves, and, in place of the mud, a brick floor has been put down;
and then there are forms arranged for the sitters, and there is a
low platform for the speaker. I do not know how it happens, but it
does happen, that up in the left-hand corner of the chapel--and it
is always the left-hand corner--there is a table and two chairs,
and on that table there is a teapot and set of cups, because in
China everything is done with tea. You must always begin in that
way. These chapels are open six days in the week in the afternoon.

'Now, supposing you come in at the door, the natural thing for the
missionary seems to be just to walk up to this table and sit down,
and then the next thing is to get a congregation. Sometimes there
is no difficulty about getting it, if it happens to be a fair day
or there is a crowd in the streets. They simply pour in: but the
tide goes different ways sometimes, and does not pour in always
like that. I want to give you just a fair, square, honest idea of
what the thing is. Sometimes the congregation will not come in, and
sometimes, after a little while, one man looks in at the door and
sees a foreigner, and he is off. He has seen quite enough and does
not want to see any more; and if you were to ask him what he had
seen, he would not say he had seen a foreigner; no, he would say he
had seen "a foreign devil." And, friends, you would not be very
much astonished that some of those ignorant men coming from the
country are alarmed when they see a foreigner, if you could only
imagine the terrible lies that they circulate about us there; about
how we take out people's hearts for the purposes of magic, and
steal people's eyes to make photographic chemicals, and administer
medicines to bewitch them generally. I say that, if the first man
who comes to a chapel on an afternoon is a man who has heard these
things, you cannot be astonished that all you see of that man is
his back and his pigtail as he goes away.

'Another man sometimes comes--a bolder man, and he comes in, and
the most natural thing for him seems to be to walk up to the table
and sit down on the other side, and there you and he are a pair.
The proper thing is to pour him out a cup of tea: that is
etiquette, and the etiquette seems