they would only peek through the doors
with grinning faces.

Finally they agreed that we could take their pictures if I would let
them put dresses on.

I didn't want to do this; for I wanted them just as they were; but saw
that they were adamant in their souls even if their brown bodies did
look as soft as ripening mangos; and as beautiful and brown.

I pictured all sorts of ugly dresses; discarded by the white folks and
given to them. But much to my surprise, when they appeared all dressed
up for the picture, every last one of them had on a white woman's
discarded night gown.

I wanted to laugh. It destroyed their picturesqueness but those gowns
could not destroy their symmetrical beauty of limb and body.

"That's a quick way to dress up!" I said to my missionary friend.

We smiled but I got the picture.

And back of these Flash-lights Feminine; is the black page of the
history of womankind in all the Far East; with footbinding still rampant
over nine-tenths of China; baby-killing, baby-selling, and baby-slavery
which I saw with my own eyes time and time again; with slavery of
womankind, from Japan down to Ceylon the regular thing. But there is
still hope in the woman-heart of the Far East; and the hope is the
American woman and her religion. That and that alone will break down
prejudices, break off shackles, and tear to bits the traditions of the
past.

* * * * *

"The women suffer! Yes, the women always suffer!" said a big fellow to
me up in the northern part of Luzon in the Philippines one evening.

"What do you mean?" I asked him, scenting a story.

Then the man told me of a cholera epidemic that he had passed through;
of how he had tried to care for the sick, even though he was not a
physician; told me of their poor superstitious methods of driving away
the "evil spirits."

He told of how he had gone into homes where he found seven inmates dead
and four dying; of how he tried to care for them with nothing medicinal
at hand.

Then he told me of how the poor people went down to a dirty inland river
and had killed a hog, taken its heart; killed a dog, taken its heart;
and then after putting them on a little raft, floated them off down the
river to drive the cholera away. Then he told me of how the natives had,
in their desperation, tied tight bands about their ankles to keep the
evil spirits from coming up out of the earth into their bodies.

"But what do you yourself