r own homes.

"I wish I could describe to you our life in that strange inland
Chinese city. We were hundreds of miles from Hong-Kong, which was the
nearest British settlement, and travelling was so difficult and so
slow that it took many weeks to reach the coast, and was both
fatiguing and dangerous. We made ourselves as comfortable as we could
in the house, half-Chinese, half-European, which had been built under
my directions, and we tried to grow English seeds in our garden to
remind us of the home we had left.

"Three children were born to us, a boy named Edmund, and twin girls
whom we christened Mary and Una, and, though we were so far away from
our own native land, we managed to be a very happy little household.
The woman Lao-ya was our nurse, and as devoted to the babies as if
they had been her own. She would never leave them for an instant, and
no trouble seemed too great for her to take on their behalf.

"Among the more earnest members of our church was a man called
Kan-Sou, who was a very clever carver of ivories, an art in which the
Chinese excel. I had been able to cure his wife of a painful disease,
and he was anxious to give me a present of some of his own work. One
day, therefore, he brought me two small lockets which he had made
specially for my two little girls. The exquisite threefold tracery of
the border was intended, so he said, as a symbol of the doctrine of
the Trinity; on one side was the Chinese equivalent for 'Good Luck',
and on the other, also in Chinese characters, the names Mary and Una.
He had contrived a secret spring by which the lockets would open, and
had carved inside the date of the children's baptism, the entire
Western part of the idea being copied from a trinket we possessed in
the house, which Lao-ya had once shown him, though his rendering of it
was wholly Eastern. As I found there was sufficient space in each to
contain a portrait, I inserted two small photographs of my wife which
I had taken myself, and coloured, and, to show our appreciation of his
kindness, we tied his gifts round the babies' necks with pieces of
ribbon. I believe poor Lao-ya must have considered them to be some
kind of Christian charm, for she would never allow them to be taken
off, and always treated them as if they were objects of veneration.

"All this time the people of Tsi-chin, though regarding us with
extreme suspicion, had never yet proved themselves to be absolutely
hostile. When the twins were n