the fabric of friendship for themselves and for the
United States.

This shuttle of service is being woven night and day across the Atlantic
and across the Pacific by great ships bearing missionaries going and
coming; furlough following furlough, after six years of service; term
after term; leaving native land, children, memories; time after time
until death ends that particular thread, crimson, gold, brown or white.
The great Shuttle of Love weaves the fabric of friendship across the
seas as the ships come and go, bearing outbound and homebound
missionaries to foreign fields.

I am thinking particularly of the Pacific as I write this sketch sitting
in a room overlooking the great harbor of Yokohama where three Japanese
warship lie anchored and two great Pacific liners, one on its way to San
Francisco and another bound for Vancouver. They come and go, these great
ships. A few days ago the _Empress of Asia_ made its twenty-eighth trip
across and it soon will start on its twenty-eighth trip back to
Vancouver again. Some of the ships out of San Francisco have made more
than a hundred trips. So they weave the shuttle back and forward across
this great sea. And never a ship sails this sea that it does not carry
its passenger list of missionaries. Our list was more than half a
hundred.

As Mr. Forman, in a sympathetic and appreciative article that he has
written for the _Ladies' Home Journal_, says, the common phrase on a
Pacific liner is, "There are two hundred and fifty passengers and
forty-five missionaries on board." Every Pacific passenger list
immediately divides itself into two groups, the missionaries and the
other passengers.

Then Mr. Forman proceeds to slay those shallow, narrow-minded, often
ignorant and uneducated tourists and business men who dare to speak of
this traveling missionary with derision. Mr. Forman has no particular
interest in missions and he has no particular interest in the Church,
but he started out to investigate this derogatory phrase, "and
forty-five missionaries."

Mr. Forman starts his article with these striking paragraphs

"If ever you cross the Pacific you will find the passengers on
the steamer quietly and automatically dividing themselves into
two groups.

"'How many passengers have we on board?' you may lightly ask
your neighbor.

"And your neighbor, traveled man no doubt (his twelfth
crossing, he will mention), will smartly reply, with a suave,