always well and full of life and vigour,
surrounded by all that can make life worth living. In China she is never
well; she is almost forgetting what is the sensation of health; she is
anaemic and apprehensive; she has nervous headaches and neuralgia; she
can have no pleasure, no amusement whatever; her only relaxation is
taking her temperature; her only diversion a prayer meeting. She is
cooped up in a Chinese house in the unchanging society of a married
couple--the only exercise she can permit herself is a prison-like walk
along the top of the city at the back of the mission. Her lover, a
refined English gentleman who is also in the mission, lives a week's
journey away, in Chungking, a depressing fever-stricken city where the
sun is never seen from November to June, and blazes with unendurable
fierceness from July to October. In England he was full of strength and
vigour, fond of boating and a good lawn-tennis player. In China he is
always ill, anaemic, wasted, and dyspeptic, constantly subject to low
forms of fever, and destitute of appetite. But more agonising than his
bad health is the horrible reality of the unavailing sacrifice he is
making--no converts but "outcasts subsidised to forsake their family
altars;" no reward but the ultimate one which his noble self-devotion
is laying up for himself in Heaven. No man with a healthy brain can
discern "Blessing" in the work of these two missionaries, nor be blind
to the fact that it is the reverse of worshipful to return effusive
thanks to the great Almighty, "who yearns over the Chinese, His lost
ones," for "vouchsafing the abundant mercies" of a harvest of six
doubtful converts as the work of three missionaries for three years.

There are 180,000 people in Suifu, and, as is the case with Chinese
cities, a larger area than that under habitation is occupied by the
public graveyard outside the city, which covers the hill slopes for
miles and miles. The number of opium-smokers is so large that the
question is not, who does smoke opium, but who doesn't. In the mission
street alone, besides the Inland Mission, the Buddhist Temple,
Mohammedan Mosque, and Roman Catholic Mission, there are eight
opium-houses. Every bank, silk shop, and hong, of any pretension
whatever, throughout the city, has its opium-room, with the lamp always
lit ready for the guest. Opium-rooms are as common as smoking rooms are
with us. A whiff of opium rather than a nip of whisky is the preliminary
to b