votee? Has she not been to Benares?

Often and often we meet her in the high-caste houses of the place, where
she is always an honoured guest because of her wonderful sanctity. She
watches keenly then lest any of the younger members of the household
should incline to listen to us.

One of her relatives is an English-educated lawyer, a bitter though
covert foe, who not long ago stirred up such opposition that we were
warned not to go near the place. Men had been hired "to fall upon us and
beat us." This because a girl, a connection of his, read her Bible
openly, instead of in secret as she had done before. He connected this
action on her part with a visit we had paid to the house, and so induced
certain of the baser sort to do this thing. We went, however, just the
same, as we had work we had promised to do, and saw the old gentleman
sitting on the verandah reading his English newspaper in the most
pacific fashion. He seemed surprised to see us as we passed with a
salaam; we saw nothing of the beaters, and returned with whole bones, to
the relief of the community at large. Only I remember one of our Band
was woefully disappointed: "I thought, perhaps, we were going to be
martyrs," she said.

[Illustration: Street in the Red Lake Village. An ordinary typical
village scene, except that just then there were more people than usual
before the picture-catching box. The only way to keep them from crowding
round it was to show them something else: this explains the group on the
stones at the side.]

And so we realise, as so often in India, the power of both extremes; the
one with all the force of his education, and the other with all the
force of her superstition, each uniting with the other in repelling the
coming of the Saviour both equally need.

As one looks at the photograph, does it not help in the effort to
realise the utter hopelessness, from every human point of view, of
trying to win such a one, for example, to even care to think of Christ?
There is, over and above the natural apathy common to all, an immense
barrier of accumulated merit gained by pilgrimages, austerities, and
religious observances, and the soul is perfectly satisfied, and has no
desire whatever after God. It is just this self-satisfaction which makes
it so hopeless to try to do anything with it.

And yet nothing is hopeless to God; "Set no borders to His strength," a
Japanese missionary said. We say it over and over again to ourselves, in
the f