onaries--the majority--who
live in luxurious mission-houses in absolute safety in the treaty ports,
yet whose courage and self-denial we have accustomed ourselves to
praise in England and America, when with humble voices they parade the
dangers they undergo and the hardships they endure in preaching, dear
friends, to the "perishing heathen in China, God's lost ones!"

In addition to the three converts who have been baptised in Tali in the
last two years, there are two inquirers--one the mission cook--who are
nearly ready for acceptance. At the Sunday service I met the three
converts. One is the paid teacher in the mission school; another is a
humble pedlar; the third is a courageous native belonging to one of the
indigenous tribes of Western China, a Minchia man, whose conversion,
judged by all tests, is one of those genuine cases which bring real joy
to the missionary. He has only recently been baptised. Every Sunday he
comes in fifteen li from the small patch of ground he tills to the
mission services. His son is at the mission school, and is boarded on
the premises. There is a small school in connection with the mission
under the baptised teacher, where eight boys and eight girls are being
taught. They are learning quickly, their wonderful gifts of memory being
a chief factor in their progress. At the service there was another
worshipper, a sturdy boy of fourteen, who slept composedly all through
the exhortation. If any boy should feel gratitude towards the kind
missionaries it is he. They have reared him from the most degraded
poverty, have taught him to read and write, and are now on the eve of
apprenticing him to a carpenter. He was a beggar boy, the son of a
professional beggar, who, with unkempt hair and in rags and filth, used
to shamble through the streets gathering reluctant alms. The father
died, and some friends would have sold his son to pay the expenses of
his burial; but the missionaries intervened and, to save the son from
slavery, buried his father. This action gave them some claim to help the
boy, and the boy has accordingly been with them since in a comfortable,
kindly home, instead of grovelling round the streets in squalor and
nakedness.

The mission-house, formerly occupied by Mr. George Clarke is near the
City Temple. We went to see it a day or two after my arrival. It is now
in the possession of a family of Mohammedans, one of the very few Moslem
families still living in the valley of Tali. "Wh