Yohannan, and reached their destination in June. Mr. Holliday
found the encouragement to labor quite as great as had been
represented by the brethren first in the field.

The extreme poverty of the Nestorians had the same effect on the
first missionaries, that like causes have had in some other portions
of the unevangelized world. It caused the whole expense of schools
and of the agency employed to be thrown upon the Christian public at
home. The board of the fifty scholars in the seminary was paid by
the mission, and people in the villages thought they could not
afford to send their children to the village schools, unless each of
them was paid two or three cents a day to buy their bread. They said
their children could earn as much by weeding the cotton, or driving
the oxen; and the brethren naturally rejoiced in being able to
afford this aid. Among the students of the seminary at this time,
were two bishops, three priests, and four deacons, who of course
were adults. Pupils in the first rudiments of their own language
received twelve and a half cents a week for their support, and the
more advanced received twenty-five cents. Experience was as needful
to discover the best methods of missionary labor, as of any other
untried undertaking.

The mission now had eight native helpers, among whom were three
bishops and two priests, all, except one, residing with the mission.
That one was the venerable Mar Elias, the oldest bishop in the
province, who superintended one of the schools. He had adopted the
practice of translating portions of the Epistles, which he read
statedly in his church. Some of the people were much delighted with
the innovation; but others, and a profligate priest among them,
complained that he annoyed them with the precepts of "Paul, Paul,
Paul," of whom they had scarcely ever heard before. But the good
bishop did not regard the opposition.

Mrs. Grant was the first member of the mission, called away by
death. She had been thoroughly educated, and the two bishops in her
family wondered to see a woman learning Syriac through the Latin
language. Nor was their wonder less when she turned to the Greek for
the meaning of some difficult passage in the New Testament. Finding
the prejudices of the people too strong to permit her to begin a
girls' school at once, she taught her own female domestics to read,
and then sought to interest mothers in the education of their
daughters. At length she succeeded in collec