can flow unhindered to these needy people. I dare not tell
you how much I pray for.

'It is the foreign element in our lives that runs away with the
money. The foreign houses, foreign clothes, foreign food, are
ruinous. In selecting missionaries, physique able to stand native
houses, clothes, and food, should be as much a _sine qua non_ as
health to bear the native climate. Native clothes are, I believe,
more safe for health than foreign clothes; they are more suited to
the climate, more comfortable than foreign clothes, and so dressed,
a Chinese house is quite comfortable. In past days I have suffered
extreme discomfort by attempting to live in foreign dress in native
houses.'

And yet James Gilmour had nothing of the fanatic or bigot about him. At
the period of his life with which we are now dealing, his severest trial
was the loneliness due to his having no colleague. Whenever his brethren
ventured to address remonstrances to him, they were due largely to the
conviction that entire isolation, such as he had to endure throughout
his Mongolian career, must tell adversely upon his temperament. But in
judging the character of the man it only heightens our love and respect
for him that he did not allow the utter and successive failures of all
efforts to secure him a colleague to hinder the work. No man more
readily and more constantly acted upon the principle of doing the next
best thing. His idea of satisfactory conditions for the work was never
reached; but this never led him for one day to relax his own efforts or
to loosen the strong hand of his self-discipline.

To any reader who has carefully followed the previous pages it must have
become abundantly evident that Mr Gilmour believed in God's present and
immediate influence in the passing events of daily life, and that the
right attitude of life is one of absolute dependence upon, and
submission to, the will of God. His diaries abound with proofs of this.
He is delayed one morning in starting from his inn, and is annoyed. An
hour or so later he overtakes the travellers who started earlier, and
finds them just recovering from the assault of a band of robbers. The
delay was God's providential care protecting him from robbery. And yet
no man was ever less under the spell of religious fatalism. All that
active effort and promptitude of mind and body could effect in the
service of life he freely and constantly expe