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LLP UATE y ; f bs I H { 1 " ber \aaee! : Poets | ‘ i tet Pas } Sti i}! i etter: beihtia! 13 i { if Bs Hu h f i in) an ( (Hs bey t Wie) See { ' ‘ | puneveusr seureessscuSuveedyveureeETedEyerenesureees hag f a Mere 199 6 Me an - —s.. R a le eeu ya bes we ve eee. Se 1S "sh ELLA MARIE HOLMES Sowing Seed in Assam MISSIONARY LIFE AND LABOURS IN NORTHEAST INDIA By E. MARIE HOLMES of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society Introduction by HELEN BARRETT MONTGOMERY ILLUSTRATED I res PRI ane OF PRINCES 7m APR % 1999 New York CHICAGO Fleming H. Revell Company LONDON AND EDINBURGH Copyright, MCMxxv, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY AMERICAN BAPTIST FOREIGN MISSION SOCIETIES Prinied in the United States of America New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street INTRODUCTION MONG all the missionaries whom the yN Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mis- sion Society has sent into the field, one of the most individual and useful was Miss E. Marie Holmes of Gauhati, Assam. Miss Holmes was sent to take care of a newly-established Girls’ School in Gauhati, and of this she made a unique institution, known throughout the length and breadth of Assam. The education of women is still in a very back- ward state in that part of the world, and in decid- ing the curriculum and plans for her new school, Miss Holmes felt that there was great danger of taking the girls away from the simple surroundings in which they must live. She put no great amount of money in pretentious buildings, therefore, but used the cottage-plan and followed the native line of architecture in the very primitive buildings which she erected. Each of these buildings housed a family of girls of different ages, with a house- mother. The girls were taught native cooking and sewing. Weaving looms were set up on the ve- randa, and all the arts of everyday life in their own villages were taught. Little waif-children and babies were taken in, and the house-family of girls 3 4 INTRODUCTION were taught to take care of these little ones. Les- sons in baby-nurture which were none the less lov- ing, because thoroughly scientific, were given the girls. They learned how to bathe and clothe and feed the children. At once a change of feeling in regard to the edu- cation of girls began to be evident in the com- munity. It had been felt before that girls who were sent to the Christian school became too highly educated and too refined for ordinary life, and were of no use to their families. Whether this criticism were just or not, it could no longer be made concerning the Gauhati girls, who were edu- cated not away from, but into their surroundings. The school soon came to the attention of the Gov- ernment, and has had a constant and flattering growth ever since. Perhaps Miss Holmes was distinguished even more as an evangelist than as a teacher. Certainly the deep passion of her heart was to get so near to the people that she could share their lives and troubles, and lead them sympathetically to the great Burden-Bearer. After some years Miss Holmes was obliged to return home to care for a beloved sister who had gone out to assist her in the kindergarten depart- ment, and became a victim of tuberculosis. She stayed at home with her sister Nettie until the death of the latter in 1922. She then returned to Assam, intending to give herself wholly to evan- INTRODUCTION 5 gelistic work; but found herself physically unable to endure the strain. There is an unusual quality that runs through Miss Holmes’ narrative. She makes you see things and hear things, almost as if you were on the ground, and her reactions are not ordinary ones. It is a great pleasure to be asked to write a brief Introduction to a book written by one who en- deared herself, not only to her colleagues, but to the Board which sent her forth. I sincerely hope for it a great future of usefulness. HELEN BARRETT MONTGOMERY Meas H Vite hp yer it ms DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER-MINE: While writing these pages, I have thought much of the debts I owe you and can never pay. Before I was born you began the second-mile service of love that has not once lagged in all these years. You never bargained for wages and have taken no account of hours, though working overtime; have never gone on strike nor taken holiday. For all the clothes you have provided, laun- dered, and mended, for all the sweeping and dusting, for all the cooking and nursing and com- forting, for all the treats you provided through sacrifice, for happy playtime and evenings around the lamp, for bedtime kisses and prayers, for a refuge with ever-open door to warm love that un- derstands without questioning, for my home and my sisters, for all precious memories of your love, I offer this little book in loving and grateful tribute. Affectionately your grown-up Girl, ELLA MARIE Redlands, Calif. Contents “ LULLABY Days ” ; ; ‘ ade . SCHOOL AND Factory YEARS. Hans a! . GETTING READY—NORTHFIELD AND NEWTON CENTRE. : é Rap Jb . AssAaM— THE WETTEST LAND ON EARTH ; ‘ ; ’ : Ad SoME LETTERS FROM THE FIELD Bane . ON FuRLOUGH AND BACK TO ASSAM: My SIstER NETTIE . ; : EOS . CARRYING ON : ; s : Pe AZS . TIMEs OF STRESS . . ; , . 160 . WaysIDE MINISTRIES . : , . 169 CHRISTMAS ON A MIssION STATION . 176 . Last Days IN ASSAM: ORDERED HoME . ‘ i : E e . 181 \ r RS ds Wes F ft uh ‘ ILLUSTRATIONS Facing Page Ella Marie Holmes A Dug-out on the Kulsi River : School Girls Wearing Their Jopi or Urbrelts ; Crossing the Boko River in a Queen’s Chair “My Four Adopted Brownies ” Ella Marie Holmes—‘ One of those Foreign Missionaries ” “Sister Nettie””—On ee eve of sailing Ae Assam The Daily Bath eh Toes Satribari Ox-cart and Driver : A Friendly Hindu Family of Good Caste , Title 50 50 74 74 98 waz I “LULLABY DAYS” HEY were willing to have me although they did not need me and could not afford me. Already there were little blue-eyed Bertha, four years and a month, and little brown-eyed Maude, who came as a present to Bertha the day two candles burned on her birthday cake. There was Mother’s mother to care for, too. There was house rent to pay and Father’s salary of fifty dollars a month was the only income. When two candles burned on my birthday cake, Mother’s fourth baby had been heir to the baby carriage for a month, and I had been promoted to the crib. Nettie, this fourth baby, was the most indispensable member of the family. I have tried to picture the years without her, in her stead an additional dress or two every year for the rest of us, an occasional extra dish on the table, and slightly different tasks filling Mother’s days. Had my parents given me life then decided that they could not afford to add to their family and had denied life to my younger sister, they would have robbed me of the greatest enrichment my life has known; they would have denied to my other sis- 11 12 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM ters and to themselves the benison of that quiet life whose daily living through the years taught us all the strength and beauty of goodness. Scores of men and women, and hosts of little chil- dren, would have found life poorer and more diffi- cult had Nettie not come their way. The mem- bers of our little family group were as different from one another as though they were unrelated, yet each brought a peculiar contribution that seemed essential to the best development of the others. In spite of our faults and differences, clannish love and loyalty welded us together in happy home-life—that seal of God’s presence among men. One of my earliest memories is of Mother put- ting us to bed at night. After she had heard our prayers, tucked us in and kissed us good-night, she would stoop to turn down the wick of the little flat-bottomed oil lamp on the tiny platform land- ing at the top of the stairs, her white, starched apron gleaming in the lamp-light. ‘No, no. That’s too low; higher than that,” we would call out until the flame was adjusted to suit us. Leaving her little ones safely tucked-in for the night, their happy whispers and giggles doing short but hopeless battle with weariness and sleep, Mother would go down the narrow, un- carpeted stairs to a heaped up mending basket, one ear open for sounds of the children up stairs and the other open to whatever Father might have * LULLABY DAYS ” 13 to recount of the day’s doings as he puffed at his pipe and turned the pages of his paper before his preliminary sleep on the dining-room lounge. Not the pay envelopes, but those evening hours was the “ day’s reward” for Father and Mother all those hard-working years of our childhood. After Mother had lowered the lamp and left us, Bertha would tell fairy tales or Mother Goose rhymes, punctuating the tales with yawns as her voice sounded more and more remote until there was no listening ear to hear what befell the prince in the enchanted castle. There is another childhood memory that I thank God American children need no longer have. Often we ran errands for neighbours. I was six, possibly seven, years old when a neighbour sent me to buy a bucket of beer; “ rushing the growler ” was the very descriptive phrase used to describe the process. It was midsummer. The saloon was four or five blocks away, down by the Seventh- street wharf. A short cut led through several lumber-yards with cinder driveways. I took the short cut, lifting my bare feet gingerly over the rough cinders, hot under the midday sun. When I rang the bell at the side door marked “ Ladies’ Entrance” a white-aproned bartender opened the door, lifted me and the bucket in his arms, and taking me into the saloon, stood me on the counter where I was made much of while he filled the can with frothy beer. I went home with a 14 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM fistful of large salty pretzels in one hand, and in the other the can of beer for which service my neighbour gave me two cents. The only pennies we had, were earned doing errands for neighbours. In those days a penny would buy a pickle with a piece of brown paper at the end to catch the dripping vinegar, a strip of fresh cocoanut fished by the grocer from a jar of water (it may have been cocoanut milk that was in the jar). You could get two long black licorice shoestrings for a penny, or gamble on chocolate turtles, some of which hid a penny within their cream-centers, or have a grab-bag of left-over can- dies with sometimes a surprise ring or trinket in it. But you could not buy less than two cents worth of beefsteak candy. Beefsteak candy was a kind of fondant with white streaks through it for the fat, and pink folds for the lean meat. Father and Mother did not attend church in those days but they sent us children to Sunday school. In the afternoons we attended a mission school where we were given little wooden barrels to fill with money and return. I got enough pen- nies in my barrel to make a pleasant jingle when I shook it. Once when I happened to shake the barrel with the slit side down, a penny rolled out. More shaking brought forth a second penny. Two pennies in my hand at once! That had not hap- pened before since I knew about beefsteak candy. If both of those pennies were mine I could sample “LULLABY DAYS” 15 beefsteak candy. Some day I would have two pennies at once. I would save my next penny until I got another and then I could buy the candy. As I started to drop the pennies back through the slit in the barrel it occurred to me that it was useless to wait to save the pennies when I might just as well borrow the two right in my hand and pay them back when I had earned two cents. So I ate two cents worth of beefsteak candy and it was so good! Better even than I had thought it would be. For some days after I did not get a penny for errands, but I went around to the candy store and looked at the beefsteak. There was not very much left and maybe the next lot would not be so good. So I went home and got the barrel just to see if I could tell how many pennies were in it. After I had shaken out two, I visited the candy store again and had more than a look at the candy. After several other beefsteak feasts, there was nothing left in the barrel to jingle when I shook it. Although pennies were scarce when we were chil- dren, and we knew but little of confectioners’ goodies, still we had frequent family treats. How Mamma ever managed it, on her ten and twelve dollars a week, has ever been to me a mystery. Every Sunday there was a tin plate of brittle taffy that broke in kaleidoscope figures when hit on the bottom of the cooling pan with a knife handle. Sometimes there was a cake with icing or custard 16 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM between the layers; or there was popped corn, pudding which had been frozen in the snow or frost; there were black walnuts or hickory nuts, cracked between two flat irons and the kernels ex- tracted with wire hairpins. There were eventful days with a swing in the woodshed on which we took turns. A “ go” lasted until the swing came still after hard pushing while we recited: “Charlie Buck had money enough To lock tt up in the storehouse; But when he died he closed his eyes And never saw money any more. A high swing, a low swing, A very good swing for Charlie Buck.” A board over a keg or a box see-sawed to the tune of: “See-saw, Margery Daw, Johnnie shall have a new master ; He shall make but a penny a day Because he can’t work any faster.” Button-strings were all the rage in those days and every youngster teased her mother for pretty buttons. When a string of threaded beauties was swung awhirl by an expert then held taut at either end while the buttons spun elliptical circles of glistening beauty, the sight made all envious be- holders hold their breath with admiration. An ex- change of buttons was made with all the haggling *“ LULLABY DAYS” 17 of an Oriental bazaar or a Los Angeles real estate agent. - Annually, with summer clothes appeared “ light boxes.” These were generally shoe-boxes with stars, moons, fruit, flower and animal shapes cut from the pasteboard and the spaces filled in with brightly coloured tissue paper, a candle within the box making the gay paper cuts shine brightly on dark nights. A string pulled through one end of the box enabled it to be dragged over the pavement behind the happy owner. Some boxes were built two or three tiers high. It was a dangerous toy for little children and fatal accidents probably brought it into disfavour. Ring-games were part of summer sport, too. While fathers and mothers sat on front porches enjoying the cool and rest after the long day of hard work, and called back and forth from porch to porch in neighbourly fashion, their children made the night merry with “ Lazy Mary,” “ The Farmer in the Dell,” ‘‘ Waiting for a Partner,” “Go In and Out the Windows,” ‘‘ London Bridge,” “‘ Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” ‘“ Drop the Handkerchief,” and other childish roundelays. During the winter different cliques used to get up shows to which an admission of from two to ten pins was charged. The show would sometimes be a trick, a story acted out by the children dressed up for their parts, or by paper people on a paper stage; sometimes it would be a real program with 18 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM pieces, songs, dances, and dogs and cats doing tricks. All the year around Saturday was bath-night, and that was such a good time when we lived in a house with a zinc tub with a slippery, sloping head. We would soap the slide, sit up at the top and speed down into the bath with a splash. A bath in a wooden tub on the kitchen floor was not nearly so popular. When, for some weeks, great earthen pipes were strung along one side of a street at the back of our house, there was endless fun playing tunnel and crawling through the pipes a whole block’s length. Then one sad day the pipes were lowered into the ditch, and after the workmen went home we played tunnel one more last time before the dirt was thrown over the pipes. When I emerged from the far end of the tunnel, hands, face, white apron, stockings, shoes, were daubed with red clay. I did not dare let my mother see me like that and did not know how to keep her from seeing me. One of the boys suggested that I get under the old wooden pump which stood in front of the candy store and have one of the children pump while the others scrubbed me. This promised some improve- ment at least, so I scraped away at the clay while we stole along the back alley to the pump. I stooped under the spout and was pumped upon and scrubbed with a vengeance, but came forth from the operation feeling and looking worse than be- * LULLABY DAYS” 19 fore. Running, weeping and wailing, I sped in search of the mother I had before sought to escape, while little rivulets irrigated all the block-and-a- half which lay between the pump and home. On one occasion I tumbled accidently into one of the nicest times I ever had. Mother used to sit backwards on the window-sill to wash windows. One day I sat thus in a second-story window to see what it felt like. I turned a somersault back- wards into a trash-barrel where a broken thin red glass pitcher stuck into my foot. When mother picked me up she held me close and had everybody jumping around filling the orders she gave. After the glass was extracted I was put to bed in Net- tie’s cot in Mother’s room and I had to stay there day and night for some time. But I enjoyed it immensely. All the children wanted to give me some of their treasures; Mother used to sit by me and feed me; and every evening Father brought me home a roll-picture advertising the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Stores, a brand of soap or condensed milk, or an insurance company. Sweet to my soul was the sight of the anxious faces of my sisters and little friends as they asked how I felt. As I got better and these same children presumed upon old familiarity I gave them to understand that a girl with a cut foot could never again be just the same ordinary child she had been before. After my foot had healed, my mother made me, out of my.grandmother’s old circular cape, the 20 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM most beautiful black satin dress with a guimpe of yellow silk and a spray of buttercups embroidered around the yoke. I must have looked well in it, for Mother told Father to take me by Uncle Jim’s. Now Uncle Jim kept a store and Mother’s object in sending me to him was to make him envious of his poorer brother’s treasures. It was Sunday afternoon but he took us down stairs and gave me a bag of round dome-shaped cakes with pink and chocolate icing on them. That same afternoon on our way home Father took me into a power-house with great throbbing engines and whirling wheels; then to a fire-house where one of the firemen held me up so that I could rub the soft velvet noses of the big horses. When I got back home with my bag of cakes and stories of adventure I found it just as interesting to be well and have a black satin dress with buttercups on it and be carried around and shown off as it had been to have a cut foot and sympathetic folk hovering around. There was some sort of pleasure in everything that happened. II SCHOOL AND FACTORY YEARS HEN I was about eight years old Father \ ‘ | went to be a clerk in his brother’s store about seven miles from Washington; so for four years we had a taste of country life. If I had to choose between the two, I would rather give my small children four years of country life than give them four years of college later on. Im- pulses and influences took root in those four years that have been as sheltering vines, as flowering plants, and as fruitful trees, in the years that have followed. Days there were out-of-doors, walks through fields bespangled with daisies and butter- cups, through woods fragrant with arbutus hiding Spring’s loveliness under Winter’s dead leaves, while mating birds sang love-songs as they built nests and brooded their eggs. The nights were cozy, with the family circle gathered around a lamp on the table and pets sleeping at our feet. So far as income was concerned we had no more money than we had possessed when in the city, but we had all the wealth of out-of-doors, so we did not feel poor. Not only does the family circle seem closer and cozier in a country home, but in a rural community 21 22 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM the spirit of neighbourliness seems warmer and stronger than it is possible for community feeling to be in a town or city where neighbours know little of one another and have many diverse interests away from home and neighbourhood. Much has been written of the narrowness of country life and of the gossiping propensities of country folk, so that these two terms pass unchallenged. “ Nar- rowness,” where by day the eye follows long stretches of road through green fields and by rugged streams until lost amongst hills and great trees that stretch their finger tips to touch heaven’s blue! A sweep of the eye from those upstretched trees, draws a great circle joining heaven and earth at its circumference, while all the land is aquiver with living, growing plants nodding and bowing in friendliness while busy creatures work in their shade or wing their way joyously to heights beyond reach of the tallest tree. By night the darkness, undimmed by glaring artificial lights, draws the gaze above where God’s glory blazes in stars un- veiled by smoke. Change the green of summer to the rioting colours of autumn or the quiet, glisten- ing white of winter and you have new characters, new costumes, on the same matchless stage stirring the soul and whetting the mind until they are rest- less as with growing-pains. In the dozen or score of houses nestling under trees, by brooks or on hilltops, live men, women and children whose lives are rich in every great SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 23 human experience. Here babies come, “ trailing clouds of glory” that all are unconsciously con- scious of; they grow into childhood with its play and school, into manhood and maidenhood with its beauty, work and love. Marriage-bells ring and new homes are built; sickness and sorrow come with their chastening power; tragedy creeps in and death enters its claim. In a country community these things are not material for newspaper re- ports; they do not occur daily, and so make little impress. But through the years they happen to flesh-and-blood people whose Christian names are spoken in every household, whose traits, ambi- tions, abilities, failures, successes, are fairly esti- mated by their neighbours. The “ gossip ” of the countryside is usually natural curiosity sympa- thetically busy, not with strangers or acquain- tances, but with friends and well-known neigh- bours. But out of this so-called “ narrowness ” and gossip have come poets to sing songs of nature, home, and love, with such constraining sweetness that all the world sings with them; and from coun- try homes have come pioneer souls of vision and daring to lighten dark continents and to open doors of freedom for those carried from thence into slavery. A year ago Mother, Bertha and I drove out to Landover and walked over the old landmarks. We went to the little brown house below the station where Mother had sought to augment her income 24 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM by boarding four of the men working on the Chesa- peake Railroad, and receiving for her labour worth- less stock in the liquidated company—scrip for two hundred dollars that would not reduce her grocery bill by a dollar. A brook running alongside the road in front of the brown house, bound Miss Joe’s apple orchard where grew the most wonderful rus- set apples that ever gave a child pain in the stomach. Mother did not whip her children often, but once, when she wanted to administer needed chastisement to me, I ran around the big flower bed in the side yard. As my fleet little mother was gaining upon me, I scampered down the ter- race, across the road, right in and through the “branch ” where my mother halted while I sought the refuge of Miss Joe’s friendly tree and the com- fort of her apples. At dusk I went sheepishly home and was sent to bed. I was wretchedly un- happy and ashamed of my naughtiness, but could not frame a confession with my tongue. So scrib- bled a note which ran: “‘ Dear Mamma, I love you and am sorry I am so bad.”’ The crumpled paper was hid under my pillow until Mother came up- stairs to fix me for the night, when I tied it to one of her apron strings. There was no Protestant church or Sunday school in Landover when we first moved there. Some of the mothers decided to build a Union church. While the church was building the Sun- day school, preaching services and prayer meeting SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 25 were held in our home. Here the preachers were often entertained Tuesday and Sunday evenings, and here, too, the ladies gave a dance and supper for the benefit of the new church building. On this occasion so many city-folk stayed all night that we slept in beds crosswise, with chairs pulled up to support the feet of the taller girls. Because Mother did not approve of the teacher, I was out of school for a year and a half in Land- over. I then spent a year in Philadelphia where I attended school. We moved to Baltimore shortly after I returned from Philadelphia. I entered the Baltimore schools about Easter and was placed in the seventh grade. The Baltimore children had been studying algebra all the year; I had never heard of it. I had no patience with it. I found X particularly exasperating and elusive. It was never the same thing twice in succession. Other chil- dren got five and ten home-problems correct every night while I had not the faintest idea as to how to proceed. Ah, Emma Lou! I can sympathize with you. But I retrieved myself on the Easter composition that we had to write in school. My teacher and the principal gave me a private audi- ence after school and bestowed high praise upon my composition, then declared that the child who wrote that paper could easily master algebra—as though bursting bulbs and butterflies with newly acquired wings had anything in common with life- less X! Papa could not get work as easily as 26 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM we had supposed he could, so after about two weeks at school I ceased to bother about X and ac- companied Bertha and Maude to the factory where Bertha was bookkeeper and Maude operated a machine. We left home in mornings about twenty or twenty-five minutes after six and by steady walk- ing arrived at the factory just as the whistles blew seven. It was a large overall and shirt factory about half a block deep. We walked upstairs to the third or fourth floor. There were windows at front and back, but the centre of the room was quite dark except for lighted gas jets. A great engine at the back of the room revolved rods which ran under long tables and operated machines at which women bent. The operators worked piece- work. As one hand pulled the garment from the machine and dropped it on the floor to the right, the other hand automatically reached for another garment from the pile stacked on a box at the left of the machine. I was floor-girl. Going up and down the aisles I picked up the overalls, folded and piled them on a table until I had a stack that reached from my shoulder to the top of my head. Around this I stretched my little arms and carried the burden to the great table at the front of the room where the work was examined. There was no time to sit or rest until the noon whistle blew. Then from paper bags we brought out our sandwiches, fruit and SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 27 cake. Some girls brought bottles of tea or coffee which they poured into tin cups with handles bound with cloth so they could be held over the gas jets, to heat their contents. From twelve to twelve- thirty the clock travelled at a pace designed to make up for the lagging of time before and after that period. Hardly were the contents of the paper sacks disposed of when the twelve-thirty whistles blew, the deafening din of machinery re- started, and work commenced again. I continued plodding the same round until five-thirty when there was a rush for four faucets at the sink where about a hundred girls sought to wash off the blue dye and change into dresses fit to wear on the street. My knees shook with exhaustion as I walked downstairs and joined the jostling crowds on the sidewalks,—all homeward bound. When we came to the corner, dismayed to see Bertha cross the cartracks rather than join the waiting crowds, I cried out to her, “Oh, Bertha! Aren’t we going to ride home? I’m so tired!” Still walking briskly, Bertha answered, “I’m afraid not, honey; we can’t afford it. You won’t feel so tired when we have been out in the air awhile, and have gotten away from the crowds.” I wanted to sit on the curb and cry. I thought I never could walk home. How gladly at that mo- ment I would have gone back to school and that algebraic X. Let X be the number of blocks home. At every crossing I counted them to keep the tears 28 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM back and my legs moving. Carfare for the three of us would have been fifteen cents, three-fifths of my ten-hour-day’s earnings. The next day the program was the same and for many days thereafter. On Saturday I received my week’s wages, a dollar-and-a-half, that is, twenty- five cents a day, two-and-a-half cents an hour. After a few months I was promoted to a cording machine and ran cords in the fronts of men’s shirts. On this work (by taking all of my mistakes home to make right at night) I made as much as two dol- lars and forty cents in one week. Then I went to another factory to operate a button machine for two dollars a week. Here I broke the record by sewing on (as I remember it) 2,000 buttons a day! Occasionally rush orders necessitated our working overtime—sometimes until eight or nine o’clock at night. At such times the piece-workers were paid for the work done and time-workers received as compensation for the extra two or three hours’ work a box of half a dozen fried oysters with a piece of pickle and some crackers. This in the the years 1896-1899 in the city of Baltimore! Organized labour has made some mistakes in policy and control, but it is owing to its efforts that a labourer usually receives something like a worthy recompense for hire and a child of twelve does not have to work in factories. Had labour not organ- ized, the conditions of 1896 would probably still be maintained; employers would be living in even SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 29 more palatial homes and labourers be living in the wretched abodes that to this day stand in mute accusation along the railroad tracks in the mining sections of West Virginia, marring the beauty of the fair hills of that state. One morning on my way to work, I saw a large billboard announcing that Maude Adams was play- ing at a local theater. Now the previous week I had read many beautiful things concerning Miss Adams’ private life and professional career. As a little girl of five or six, I had sat with Bertha and one of her girl-friends in the peanut gallery to see “A Farmer’s Daughter,’ and when I was but twelve, a neighbour in Philadelphia had taken me to see “ Faust.” Dozens of times since that day I had acted some of those scenes out before admiring youngsters. An old longing to make vast audi- ences laugh and cry at my will, was revived with all the vitality of hibernated hope. I could not afford the price of a ticket to see Maude Adams, so I wrote the celebrity a letter telling her that I was undecided whether to be a writer or an actress, that my people did not want me to go on the stage but that I thought I would do it anyway, only I did not know how to go about it, so was hoping that she would send me instructions for which I enclosed a stamp. This was the method followed to secure instructions concerning anything that was advertised in a Fireside Companion that used to come to our house in Landover. 30 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM All that week Bertha and Maude walked home far too slowly to suit me, so eager was I for Maude Adams’ letter that I confidently expected each night. But the answer never came and my two postage stamps and the paper and envelope that I had bought at a notion store, were wasted. But my desire did not die easily. I watched the want ads, and the summer that I was fifteen I saw that two sixteen-year-old girls were wanted to help out in a cast. They were to apply at a certain ter- race. I thought that I knew where this was and set out for it in high glee, mentally reading news- paper accounts of Ella Marie Holmes’ beautiful home life, her deeds of charity, and the splendour of her professional career. I clipped some of the most glowing recitals to send to Maude Adams without an enclosed stamp. I hunted for that ter- race until dark, but found it not and then went sor- rowfully home. While working in factories I never went out in the evening. If there were no work to rip I used to read my sister Nettie’s books from the Enoch Pratt Library. After Father got work and our finances were more promising, I had another year at school. One Friday afternoon my teacher read aloud from Hiawatha. It was hard to keep the tears back, I was so happy. It reminded me of the song of the brook at Landover and of the passing of the breeze in the tree-tops in the wood where arbutus grows. All sense of words and all SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 31 trend of a tale were lost in the flow of words and their music. This was a new thing to share with Nettie. It was about this time that I became interested in atheism. My father and his five brothers had been brought up according to the strictest sect of Scotch Presbyterianism. On weekdays they were driven to school'in a carriage, but on Sunday they had to walk to church and Sunday school. They were not allowed to whistle or sing. The Bible and Sunday-school paper were the only legitimate Sab- bath literature. I judge that the father’s skilfully hidden love found expression in rules of conduct and economy of expenditure. The mother was lov- ing and generous as she dared to be. The boys grew up with nothing but bitterness for their father’s religion, and four of them lived to good old age and were buried without giving recognition at all during their later years to religion. When I was a girl my father was still an atheist and I was trying to be one, too. From the library I got Robert Ingersoll’s works and kindred books and read them. I also read much of the Hebrews and thought they must have known much more about the Christ they rejected, than the Gentiles who accepted Him could pos- sibly know. My sister Nettie was my only close friend, and I did not share my doubts and rebellion with her. For to my little sister, faith in God as always 32 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM present, always wise and loving in His guidance, gifts and denials, was as natural and as sustaining as nursing is toa babe. I hope not many children of fifteen are doomed to silent waging of battles as desperate as I fought when at that age. I took nothing for granted, accepted nothing on faith, challenged everything, doubted everything and questioned everything, from immortality to the presence of sin, sorrow and weariness. And all this mental warfare was silently waged with no one to know or help. I was wretchedly unhappy and longed to go alone to some woods where, with no one to see or know, I might seek God if haply I might find Him. Mother compelled me to attend afternoon Sun- day school with my sisters. My teacher was a good, kind woman, but she was not on very familiar terms with God. She read us what was written in her quarterly for she had nothing better written in her head and heart. I promised one of the girls with whom I worked, to visit her Sun- day school one morning and here I found a teacher who was different. She possessed a quality that the other teacher lacked. She and God were good friends; she stayed close by Him so that He could send her on errands. I think that she had known sorrow and had wrested sweetness and sympathy from it. Some of my questions she answered with- out my having to ask them. For a month or more that inward battle went SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 33 on with renewed fury, but still no outward sign. My new Sunday-school teacher asked me to attend an evening evangelistic service at her church. I went alone. A white-haired saint stood in front of a vast concourse of us and spoke of God our Father, and of our Brother, Christ the Saviour. The light on the old man’s face, the earnestness of his speech, his confidence in God and his yearning love for his fellows, made his simple message eloquent. After the benediction I stole out and walked home along the wide, parked street of Eutaw Place. Away from the church the streets were deserted. There was no moon. The stars were close and friendly. To them I lifted my face and voice: ‘Oh, God!” I cried, “I don’t know who you are or what you are; I don’t know where you are nor how to come to you, but I need you. I’m making a bungle of things and I’m so unhappy. Take charge of me, dear God.” The stars and I have been in league ever since that night. Quietly I finished my walk home. As a wee child losing sight of its mother in a crowd, runs hither and yon, becoming ever more terrified and fearful, then catching sight of the familiar face, finds shelter in protecting arms and after one or two gulping breaths, nestles a tear-stained face in the haven of mother’s breast—thus that night was I comforted by God. In the dark and quiet of my room I definitely committed my way to Him, and as I review the 34 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM twenty-four years that have since passed, I find that all the days of all the years testify marvel- ously to His direction of my paths. Not yet do I understand the reason for some of the detours, the hard, rugged climbing, the foggy stretches, the lonely ways. But all that I do understand proves irresistibly and conclusively that the journey was wisely planned, is being personally conducted and leads to a desirable end. And so I do not find it difficult to trust, concerning those stretches that have been and are as yet obscure. The next morning I got up a little earlier, copied a Bible verse on a slip of paper and memorized it on my way to work. But I told no one of my ex- perience, for a fortnight. Then I asked for bap- tism in my own church, and after doing this went home and told the folk that I had been converted. An aunt who was living with us, laughingly warned me that my hair was still red. The next morning we began saying grace before meals. Ill GETTING READY FTER joining the Church I was given a A piece to recite on Children’s Day. It was about millions in China dying unsaved. I thought it was sad and tried to make it appear so to others, but I had no idea whether these mil- lions were dying unsaved from fire, pestilence, or sword. Never, to my knowledge, had I heard of missions, either home or foreign. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday we moved back to Washington, where, for two years, I worked in a cousin’s store. Later I cashiered in a grocery store and clerked in a drug store, doub- ling my salary and leisure and finding time to read. One Sunday when I was eighteen, Dr. Willing- ham of Richmond preached the first foreign mis- sion sermon I ever heard. Immediately I decided to become a foreign missionary and was puzzled to know why all the young people who had heard the address had not made similar decisions. Again I was ignorant as to how to enter upon my chosen career. Miss Appler, my Sunday-school teacher at that time, gave me the address of our foreign mission society in Boston. I wrote them, expect- ing that in two weeks or so, I would be on my way to Africa. The letter from Boston stated that I 35 36 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM must have the equivalent of a High School educa- tion and some special training in addition, and that twenty-five was the minimum age for entering for- eign mission service. This time Ignorance stood by Youth barring the gate to Paradise. A High School education! And I had been in school but five-and-a-half years all told! It would take me until I was twenty-five to do what was required for preparation. I began at once by getting books from the library and by reading Nettie’s school books. And I began to save. I wore blue gingham shirt-waists —even on Sunday. I walked to and from work, except when on night duty. In summer, when I hankered for an ice-cream soda, I would walk up’ to a drug-store window, stop a few minutes to look at the soaps, perfumes, brushes, etc., displayed there, then walk away wiping my lips and making believe that I had been inside and had a soda. The home-folk, laughing indulgently, remarked that this was a new kind of fever and would probably spend its course just as the stage-fever had done. Handed-on clothes had always helped out with my wardrobe, so most of my spending money changed hands over second-hand bookstalls. When I heard my first missionary sermon, I was the proud and devoted possessor of about seventy-five books. I supposed that when I should sail away as a mis- sionary, I could take only such possessions as might be carried in a suitcase or trunk, and so GETTING READY 37 thought there would be no room for books. In proof of the earnestness of my intentions, I dis- tributed my books amongst my friends, keeping for myself only Watson’s Life of The Master. This violent burning of bridges convinced the family that the new fever was a serious attack. A friend told me about Northfield Seminary and I learned that I could earn a one-term scholarship by securing one hundred subscriptions to The Record of Christian Work. I straightway pro- ceeded to do this. While canvassing for subscrip- tions I learned lessons that are on no school cur- riculum—lessons in human nature. Greater than the surprise of learning how little many people of comfortable circumstances feel that they can af- ford, apart from personal and household adorn- ment, was my surprise to find how ready the poor often are to make an expenditure calculated to help some one else. Possibly they have formed the habit of doing without things; certainly they have learned the joy of sharing what one has. One of my most generous friends was my Sunday-school teacher. She herself had wanted to be a foreign missionary but her health prevented. After spend- ing the trying summer days in an office, she de- voted four nights a week through the hot summer months and her rare teaching ability to helping me with my books. Because of this loving service I was able to pass off most of my preparatory work 38 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM when I entered Northfield Seminary, September, 1905. The following four years at Northfield gave me much more than gleanings from books. There I had my first view of mountains, and needed no other testimony that the blood which nourished me had once coursed through the veins of men and women who stopped at their work to lift up their eyes unto the hills with all a highlander’s love of lofty places. On the first Sunday afternoon at Northfield one of the teachers sat on the carpet of brown needles under the Cathedral Pines and read to us Dr. Van Dyke’s story of “‘ The Other Wise Man.” Before the reading was over my arms had to shield a wet face buried in the needles. This was the first of many cherished experiences out of doors. There were tramps in snowstorms, long walks on frosty mornings when trees, bushes and houses glistened dazzlingly with jewelled icicles, when the ground was hid with sparkling gems; then hunts for the first arbutus and violets; Bird Day, when we tramped the hills, beautiful in fresh greens and spring blossoms and pungent with the smell of new life; Apple Blossom Sunday, when trees of pink posies quivered and bowed in the orchards, like little children in new spring dresses speaking pieces from a platform; Mountain Day, when frost had opened chestnut burrs and spilled the glossy brown nuts on the brilliant foliage with which the trees were having a quilting party against GETTING READY 39 winter’s cold. And there were close daily contacts with women of noble spirit, who shared with hun- dreds of eager girls the fine fruits of years of scholarship, culture and experience. After the first semester: my Sunday school paid a hundred dollars a year for my board and tuition. During the Christmas vacation I hired a hall in Washington and gave an evening of readings that usually netted sufficient to pay my carfare for the vacation and a surplus that took care of fees, books, clothes, etc. In my senior year expenses were heavy, but I came out a little ahead by giving readings in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, during the Easter recess, and by winning first prize in the Temperance prize-speaking contest. Several times while at Northfield I was hard pressed for funds, but every need was wonderfully supplied, although I never spoke or wrote to any- one about my need of money. At noon one Mon- day in my Junior year, I was without a cent. That afternoon I had to pay a fifty-cent class fee and have a dollar and a quarter for a French book. Going to my room I found my room-mate out. Locking the door, I knelt by my bed, told God of my need and reminded Him that there was no one else to whom I could look for support. While I was still kneeling someone knocked at the door. It was the girl delivering the noon mail. She handed me a letter bearing the Washington post- mark. Folded within a blank piece of paper was 40 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM a five-dollar bill. I do not know whom He used, but I know that my Father sent me that money. It had been mailed in Washington before I knew that I would need it. ‘‘ Before they call I will an- swer; and while they are yet speaking I will hear.” I needed only a dollar and seventy-five cents, but received more than twice that amount. This is God’s “good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over.’’ On another occasion I had written my home letter but had no stamp nor a cent with which to buy one. The same day I had a letter from my sister Maude enclosing six two-cent stamps, accompanied by a word saying that she had them in her desk and thought that I could use them. “Childish, inconceivably childish!” you may say, to suppose that the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe Who stores forests of coal and rivers of oil in the bowels of the earth, crowns Everest with everlasting snow, and directs worlds in their courses,—that this Creator and Sustainer takes account of a little factory girl’s need of a two- cent postage stamp! Frankly I acknowledge such personal care of the Creator for one of His small creatures to be beyond the grasp of my understanding, too, but it is in the realm of my experience. And in my religion I am as ready to be taught by forty years of life’s experiences, as in the study of a science I am open to laboratory experiments and demonstrations to prove theories GETTING READY 41 of chemistry, physics, astronomy and botany, that as bare statements stagger my understanding. Nor do these experiences of a personal God as a Father wisely, lovingly, intimately, active in all that conerns His children, rest only on my two- score years of experience: That is but a small rock in a mighty structure that has been millenniums in construction and on which shepherds, farmers, fishermen, housewives, generals, kings, poets and philosophers have wrought, testifying from the most varied experiences of their widely different stations in life, that God has dealt with them “ as an eagle stirreth up her nest,” fluttering over her young, spreading abroad her wings, taking them, bearing them on her wings; as a Shepherd feeding His flock in green pastures and by still waters, gathering the lambs in His arms, carrying them in His bosom and having thought for the mother sheep who find the way hard because of their con- cern for their young; as a Guide directing to the right hand and the left, arranging schedule, mak- ing record of the mileage, in mercy preventing, bringing safely to a desired haven and a good land; as a Lover loving with an everlasting love that many waters cannot quench, neither can the floods drown, drawing to Himself with bands of love, with love’s insistence ever wooing to higher things; as a Father bearing His son in His mind and heart, taking him by his arm to teach him to take his first steps, correcting, instructing, pitying, afflicted 42 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM in all His children’s afflictions, running with royal welcome to greet a wayward son as he turns towards the Father’s house; as a mother comfort- ing a wounded spirit and bleeding heart. But even this array of word pictures did not suffice David, the shepherd-king-poet, the father of steadfast love for a rebellious son, as he reviewed God’s care for him in all his chequered career; so faithful and rich in loving-kindness had he found God to be, that he said he would trust Him to take him up even in the inconceivable possibility of his father and mother forsaking him. The coming of my friends prove that God counted their steps and mine and directed us to our meeting. Marvelously has their coming been timed and placed, bringing particular gifts to meet peculiar needs: a teacher when the mind needed direction, a physician when the body needed care, a strong arm when there was need to lift a load beyond my physical strength, a warm and under- standing heart waiting at the end of every hard lonely passage, and most of the way there was my sister Nettie to cool my hot temper with her calm, to check my rash impulses with her sanity, to love me though knowing all my unloveliness, and to be- lieve in me when for others I had no promise. These friends could no more have chanced to come in the fullness of time and at the appointed place of need, than Orion happens every year to wander across our winter skies; or than our American GETTING READY 43 world-fliers chance to find new equipment and sup- plies waiting them at stated landing places. Since God has thought for the protection of a fern frond as He calls it from under the soil into the sunlight, I can believe that He is mindful of a factory girl’s need of a two-cent stamp; since He times the stars along courses He has mapped out for them, is it impossible that our times are in His hands or that our steps are ordered by Him? After graduating from Northfield I had a year at home in Washington attending normal school and substituting in the graded schools. This was of all years the one when I was most needed at home as my sister Maude was ill and my mother had persuaded her husband to let her come home to be nursed. In September, 1910, I started in for a year’s work at Newton Centre Theological Seminary. When [I had been in the school but a month I was asked if I would accompany a bride and groom to Assam. I did not know where Assam was, but replied that I would go. There were but ten days in which to shop, dress-make and pack. I have always been glad that the time for preparation was so short, that there was no time to be dismal and no time for farewell parties. My heart’s desire was gratified when the steam- ship Winifredian pulled away from her dock in Boston, November 3, 1910. Just before the ap- 4A SOWING SEED IN ASSAM pointed hour for sailing we discovered that none of my baggage was aboard! The transfer com- pany had delivered it at the wrong dock. I worea coat-suit and had a nightbag with a “ nightie,” toothbrush and paste, soap-box and handkerchiefs. Besides the bride and groom there were three other passengers: an invalid who never left her cabin, a dear Scotch spinster, and an interesting old Irish lady whose morning and night refreshment fumes escaped from her cabin to mine and were different from the jube-jubes of which her breath smelled when she came on deck. The invalid had a beautiful fur-lined coat which she loaned me; the Scotch lady contributed a blue, cotton blouse; and the bride and groom graciously put their steamer chairs close together so that one steamer rug sufficed for them, in order to give me the use of their second rug. Fog-horns were busy much of the way, and we were nine days crossing. I went to bed in the afternoons so that the stew- ardess could launder some things for me and dry them in the engine-room. My trunk was located and forwarded on a White Star liner and was wait- ing for me in Liverpool, when we arrived. After the Scotch passenger had shown me Liver- pool there was still a week before we sailed for India. The bride and groom decided to remain in Liverpool, so I went down to London by myself. I arrived in the city after dark. I did not know anyone in London and was so unfamiliar with Eng- GETTING READY 45 lish currency that twice I had to resort to offering amazed clerks a palmful of miscellaneous coins from which they culled the required cash. The telephone directory showed no Y. W. C. A. hotel. I called up the Association headquarters to en- quire about accommodations and was told that they made no provision for transients, but had a home for working girls. Surely I belonged to that class, but had difficulty in persuading the lady in charge to admit me, since I was not seeking work in London. The girls were going down to dinner when I arrived. We passed in single file down- stairs to the basement. In cafeteria style we helped ourselves from stacks of heavy white plates and cups and saucers. The cups were filled with hot cocoa from a big white enamel pitcher, and two steaming fat sausages and a boiled potato were put on each of our plates as we passed to our places on wooden benches running either side of two long plank-tables. On round, wooden bread-boards down the center of the table loaves of bread were placed from which we cut slices as we wished them. After dinner we went to our cubicles. A large room with a narrow passage through the center had the two sides partitioned into little narrow cur- tained spaces furnished with a single cot, a wash- stand and a little chair. After breakfast down in the basement daily I sallied forth to the British Mu- seum, the art galleries, the Tower, St. Paul’s, and Westminster Abbey, where Livingstone’s floor-slab 46 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM stirred me as none of the monuments of the other departed great did. I experienced two thrills in the English metropolis. One was a real London fog, when all the shops were lighted at ten A. M. as at night, and the buses were as sparks in dense smoke; the other thrill was encountered while on my way to Westminster when I was swallowed up in a mob gathered to support a suffragette demonstration. Women dodged the big policemen guarding the entrances, and one of their number leaped over an iron grill. Mounted officers drove the crowd back to the curb, while on the pavement other officers prodded their billies into the backs of the women and ordered them along. Schoolboys in Eton suits watched the excitement from the top of an iron fence. I wanted to go on and get out of it but there was no opening through which to worm my way. Am- bulances and patrol-wagons were clanging gongs as they rushed the women to jail. Finally I escaped into the quiet of Westminster, amazed that the calm, controlled women of England could ever be wrought up to such a militant frenzy. I returned to Liverpool and sailed for Calcutta on the S.S. City of York, from whence we jour- neyed by rail to Gauhati, Assam, at which place we arrived on Christmas Eve, 1910. IV ASSAM — THE WETTEST LAND ON EARTH SSAM is the most northeastern province A of British India. It is wedged between Burma on the south and east, and Bengal on the west. It is a huge tea-garden of rare beauty in the front yard of Tibet and Bhutan. It is one of the wettest places in the world. “ Wet,” but not in a sense opposite to that in which America is supposed to be dry just now. More rain falls upon the soil of Assam than is recorded for any other section of the earth’s surface. The average annual rainfall is from ninety-three to one hundred and twenty-four inches, but in Cherrapunji the average annual fall is four hundred and fifty-eight inches with eight hundred and five actually re- corded in one year! This abundant rainfall and melting snows from the Himalayan mountains feed a network of rivers spread out like a spider’s web over the country, with the result that Assam has more river-bed per square mile than any other part of the earth’s surface. These rivers nibble their way through fields of rice and sing seawards along rocky mountain-beds fringed with old, gnarled trees bending to see the reflected beauty of trunk and outstretched arms, spilling trailing vines, hanging mosses, ferns and 47 48 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM orchids of brown, yellow, pink, lavender and waxen-white with heart of gold. The jungle that carpets low places and hills with bewitchingly ver- dant beauty affords covert for abundant wild- animal life. Here great herds of wild elephants, tigers, leopards, bears, water-buffaloes, deer, chat- tering monkeys, the great python, small deadly krite and hooded king-cobra are at home. In little, brown cottages, usually built with floor and walls of mud and roof of thatch, nestling under clumps of plumed bamboos, in groves of palm and mango trees, live nearly eight million men, women and children. In complexion they range from the African brown of the coolie class to the dark Italian tan of the Zenana women and the people of the hills. In religion nearly half of Assam’s mil- lions are Hindus; about one-fifth are Moham- medans and a sixth are animists. The latter are principally Tibeto-Chinese-Burman tribes living in the hills. The Hindus, being Aryans, have the features of the white race; the animists or hill- people have the almond eyes, straight hair and flat noses of the yellow race. When I first read the life of David Livingstone, that part of the narrative which drove me to my room to hide my face in a pillow, was not the chapters dealing with Livingstone’s exploration of rivers and discovery of lakes, but that part of the story which tells of Livingstone’s exploration of a black man’s heart and his discovery that under THE WETTEST LAND 49 skin of black as under the skin of white, beats a heart that ‘“ seeking for God, lonely and longing runs.” After having lived a dozen years in Assam, meeting men, women and children in their homes, in schools, bazaars and railroads; after having walked with them side by side along highways where white stones check off the miles, or joined their single file along narrow trenches in flooded rice fields where villages counted distance, and through winding jungle paths where rivers crossed and to be crossed, told how much of the journey was yet to be done; after having sat in their court- yards on mats of skin or bamboo and eaten rice and curry from a banana leaf, with my fingers; after having poured tea in china cups for them as they squatted on the floor of my home,—TI found that one needs go very lightly indeed, but very lov- ingly and patiently, to find under skin of brown and tan, as under skin of white and black, a heart that “ seeking for God, lonely and longing runs.” On the night of my arrival in Gauhati the Indian Christians gave a reception. The path to the little church was banked on both sides with tall date- palm fronds behind which glimmered rows of little earthen lipped saucers of oil feeding wicks of twisted rag. In the little building used as school- house and church, mine was the fifth adult white face among faces of tan and brown. They spoke a language unintelligible to me. A hymn was an- nounced and I was handed a hymnal printed in 50 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM strange characters. Suddenly and keenly I realized that here I was a stranger and foreigner. Then the brown people arose to sing, “ Joy to the World,” “Room in My Heart for Thee,” “ What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Not a word could I understand, but I knew the songs by their famil- iar tunes, and by the “ light that never was on land or sea’ that beautified those brown faces. I knew that, after all, I was not a stranger and a foreigner, but a fellow-citizen with these saints who in an un- known tongue spoke of experiences common to all the household of God. That night heart of brown woman and heart of white woman was one in cry- ing “‘ Abba, Father,” and in looking up to God in praise and love for a common Saviour. Almost always the first year or two of a foreign missionary’s life is a time of trial and disappoint- ment. Generally loss of weight and a depression in spirits are accounted for on the score of acclima- tion. It was so in my case. I did have some malaria, but there were other things that kept me awake long hours during the night and made it difficult for me to swallow food. Naked heathen- ism at so close range was unspeakably horrid and repulsive, and there was no escape from it. Every time I had to pass through the bazaar, I saw sights that haunted me and kept sleep away at night. In my language-lessons and study of the history and customs of the people, I met repulsive statements that I was not willing at first to accept SCHOOL GIRLS WEARING THEIR JOPI OR UMBRELLA THE WETTEST LAND 51 as fact. In all of India there was not a soul that I had ever seen or known before coming to the country,—no one with whom to talk things over. The only place for laughter and light breathing was in the Tuttle family circle, where Lucile and Stephen in the charm of their childhood helped one to forget. Three months after my arrival the children went to Darjeeling with their mother to attend school in the cool of the hills. When I had been a little more than a month in Assam, I adopted three little brown girls. This helped some, although the manner of their com- ing was another horror. Proba and Leci were sis- ters, five and seven years old. Their mother was a Christian; their father ate hemp, which in its effect is similar to opium. The mother died and the father was negotiating to sell these two little girls, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, to a Mohammedan for ten rupees (about three dollars and thirty-five cents). The Mohammedan would have kept the girls as house-servants until they were about thirteen years of age when he would have sold them to some fellow-Mohammedan for wives, receiving forty or even sixty rupees apiece for them. Proba is now married to a Christian and has two children. Leci is completing her train- ing as a nurse, ready to serve in our first woman’s hospital, to be opened in Gauhati this winter. During that first year I took in a little girl about two weeks old. She had been found newly born, 52 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM in the bazaar, by sweepers early one morning. Had the little waif been a boy some sonless sire would surely have adopted her as his own. In Gauhati, a town of about 16,000 inhabitants, there is no or- phanage, no Hindu or Mohammedan hospital for humans; nor do those who profess these two relig- ions support the Government hospital except by providing patients. Yet there is a hospital for aged, injured and sick cattle, for cows are sacred to Hindus. So this little discarded mite of hu- manity was taken to the thana (police station). The baby insisted upon living, yet it could not be kept at the station. The only door open for this wee unwanted girlie was down with the women of shame, and there the policemen took her. After ten days or so the superintendent of police wrote me about the baby and asked if I could take her. At ten o’clock the next morning a policeman came with three prostitutes, one of whom produced the baby from the folds of her drapery. The child was asleep when I took her. One look at the poor mite made my eyes close to blot out the sight. She was dressed in three cords on which charms were strung at her waist and wrists. It was the hot season before the break of the monsoon,—that hottest part of the year. I think no one had cleansed the baby even in mustard oil, from the hour it was born. Warm oil applied most tenderly with absorbent cotton left raw, red skin where the accumulated filth had been. The baby slept THE WETTEST LAND 53 soundly after her bath as I wrapped her in a clean white swaddling cloth. Five o’clock that afternoon she had not yet wakened, so I called an old Bible woman and asked her what was the matter. She explained that probably before the policeman went for the baby, the women had given her opium so as not to be bothered with her crying. One of our Christian women who yearned for children but had never known motherhood, later took the baby for her very own and poured a wealth of love upon it the one short year of its life. Native Christians are often another source of disappointment to the new missionary. In mission literature and addresses one hears usually of ex- ceptional native Christians—it may be that I would better say “consecrated” native Chris- tians. Rather foolishly, and yet rather naturally, one deducts that on foreign mission fields there are no weak or wavering Christians—none to repre- sent Judas, or Ananias, but all of the type of John or Paul or James. But human nature is much the same all the world over, not only in its yearning for fellowship with God, but also in its propensity to sin and failure. In Assam, as in America, I found Christians of three classes: good, bad, and indifferent. There, as at home, are to be found those to whom religion is but a profession. They make this profession as a fee for which they re- ceive Christian marriage, baptism for their young, 54 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM and Christian burial—not bad returns for the in- vestment made. During my first year in Assam one of our lead- ing educated Christians, the husband of a good wife and father of two children, betrayed the six- teen-year-old motherless daughter of the pastor, while she was looking after four younger children during her father’s absence on an evangelistic tour. Other similar cases occurred during those first years. This is the wolf ever at the door of the Indian Christian Church. And ever in his wake is confession with bitter tears, and severance from the body of believers until a new walk in life proves a departure from the old sin. For there is this difference between Christians who live immorally and their Hindu and Mohammedan neighbours who do the same thing: For the Christian it is a violation of his religious precepts and places the offender outside the membership of the Christian Church at least temporarily; whereas for Hindu, Mohammedan and animist, immorality imposes no religious penalty. In Assam, as in America, I found, also, Chris- tians who have literally ‘“ suffered the loss of all things and do count them but refuse that they may win Christ.” Listen to the story of Mrinaram, father of Bhuri. Mrinaram was his father’s oldest son. The father was the headman of his village. For centuries the oldest son of this house had been the village leader. And in his turn, Mrinaram THE WETTEST LAND 55 would succeed his father as headman of the village. The village lay on the north bank of the Brahma- putra River not very far from Gauhati. In order that Mrinaram might be well prepared for his du- ties, his father sent him to Gauhati to attend high school. While at high school Mrinaram, one evening in the bazaar, heard of Jesus Christ. He called at the mission bungalow to learn more of Jesus. He found Christ very winsome and almost he was per- suaded to become a Christian, but hesitated be- cause the price he must pay was heavy. Later he went to Calcutta to attend the University. While there he was baptized. Such news travels fast even in the jungle, “for a bird of the air shall carry the voice and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.” Mrinaram’s old father and mother sent for their son. They plead with him to renounce his new faith, undergo the ceremony of being reinstated into caste and let all things be as they had been. They reminded him that if he persisted in the course he had chosen he might not put his shoulder to a burden borne by his old caste-fellows; nor could he drink from the village well, or again eat with his father, or with any of his family or under any caste-roof; neither would he be allowed to settle in the village. His younger brother would succeed to his father’s place and patrimony. If Mrinaram persisted in being a 56 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM Christian, he would be dead to Hinduism, dead to his village, dead to his home. Mrinaram’s first marriage ceremony with a little girl in the village had been performed. His wife had remained in her father’s house expecting the second ceremony to be performed when she was about thirteen, when she would go to her hus- band’s home. When her young husband became a Christian and dead to Hinduism, this little girl automatically became a widow, although she had never lived with her husband. After Mrinaram was adamant to all entreaties to renounce Christ, it was arranged that he might have his wife, hop- ing that she would win him back to caste. In- stead, the young husband won his girl-bride for Christ. As Christians the two young people had no place in their old community so they went out not knowing whither they went. Although the torn hearts of their parents plead for them and suf- fered with them, they could not lighten the sen- tence Hinduism imposed upon their children. All that they had known and hoped for, this young couple, a girl of thirteen and a boy of about eigh- teen, forsook for Christ’s sake, ‘‘ esteeming the re- proach for Christ greater riches than the treasures of ” Hinduism. One’s fellow-missionaries are sometimes a source of disappointment to the new missionary. When I left America I remembered that my hair was still titian and my temper of the same shade, so THE WETTEST LAND 57 I did not expect the voyage across the ocean to perfect my saintship. But I did expect other mis- sionaries to be so good that continued contact with them would effect a decided improvement in me. I still believe that when the love of Christ con- trols our words and works and operates in our lives as we see it operating in the thirteenth of First Corinthians, no degree of incompatibility of temper can betray missionaries into saying and doing some of the unchristian things that some of the members of our profession have said and done. I have met a few missionaries whose daily lives have evinced but little of the graciousness and win- someness that marked all that Christ did and said, a few whose spirit and methods seem so little akin to Christ’s that one may but wonder what motive ever led them into foreign service for Christ. There is a nimbus to foreign work as viewed from a distance, a glamour of romance, the appeal of an opportunity to travel, to meet people of dis- tinction and achievement, to work at big tasks,— these things are all alluring and not to be dis- counted, but together they do not constitute ade- quate justification for appointment to the ranks of Christ’s ambassadors abroad. Amongst mission- aries as amongst physicians, teachers, lawyers, mechanics, there are misfits. While I cannot deny that some missionaries have failed wretchedly, I can testify of many more who have wrought won- drously in the spirit and after the manner of 58 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM Christ, and I thank my God upon every remem- brance of them. From many whose lives have been an inspira- tion and association with whom has been a privi- lege, let me tell you of one Pitt H. Moore of Now- gong, Assam, who walked worthy of the vocation wherewith he was called. When he first came to Assam, aS a young man of twenty-seven, Mr. Moore was the champion tennis-player in the province. His thoughts were direct and expressed in chaste, lucid English. He found the study of Assamese difficult at first and was slower than most missionaries to begin to use the language. But he afterwards became so expert in the use of the vernacular, that when the Assamese heard his voice but could not see the speaker, they supposed they were listening to a fellow-countryman using their mother-tongue. When this man had served in Assam for more than thirty years and had de- veloped statesman-like qualities that made his judgment of mission problems of great value, I was privileged to spend some months in his home. Not for an equal number of years’ training in any institution that I know of, would I exchange those months of fellowship with this ideal missionary. His home was an old bungalow that had been built in 1850, with trees carried from the jungle by elephants. Not a nail was used in its construction, the material being tied with beth (pronounced bet[h]), the outer THE WETTEST LAND 59 fibre of cane. It was much the worse for wear and in need of alterations and repairs; one and two inch cracks separated some of the roughly- planed floor-planks; bats infested the spaces be- tween the thatch roof and cloth ceilings, coming into the house at nightfall, flying about the rooms and fastening themselves to the mosquito curtains over our beds. The bungalow was not screened. Dozens of little house-lizards sported about the whitewashed walls, now still as death, now quick as lightning in a dart for mosquitoes. But the old place was cool and comfortable; it was rich in associations; it was loved by the Assamese, and Mr. and Mrs. Moore were quite content with it, although they generously seconded requests from younger missionaries for more comfortable and more elaborate dwellings. In all things this fine missionary was most generous with others, but carefully guarded personal expenditure and was conspicuously economical in the use of mission funds. Mr. Moore’s day began early and the freshest, best bit of it was spent in his study. At six we had early breakfast. After breakfast he was busy with teachers and preachers from the district, the sick coming for medicines, the perplexed for ad- vice, the sorrowing for comfort. A great part of the morning was spent sawing, planing, and ham- mering on the school-building that he had designed, gathered the material for and was building with 60 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM only unskilled native help, working side by side with coolies and mechanics. In a rare degree he possessed those two virtues without which one may not profitably serve in India—love and pa- tience. After the noon-meal we had prayers. Then the mission builder and statesman was a little child, simple, direct, confident in his fellow- ship with his Father; a householder with the needs of family and friends on his heart, a shepherd con- cerned for his flock, an ambassador reporting to his King and asking for instructions. Frequently we differed on questions of mission policy, and in his capacity as Chairman of our Mission Reference Committee, Mr. Moore had to vote against a measure upon which he knew that I had set my heart. I accepted his veto without question, remembering the old prayer-times and grateful for the friendship of one so true to his Master and to his interpretation of wise methods, that not even the desire to please a young mis- sionary in whom he was interested as in a daugh- ter, could deflect his vote. This man of rare gifts gave of his best as unstintingly to the poorest tea- garden coolie that came his way as he did to the highest government official or the most promising or most trying missionary. Yet was not the gift appreciated by the native church in Nowgong. The history of this church was not unlike that of the young church at Corinth, as may be gleaned from Paul’s first letter to them. There was among THE WETTEST LAND 61 them “ envying, and strife and divisions,” and this burden of the church broke their leader’s health and heart. — Tenderly his brother carried him down to Cal- cutta where skilful surgeons tried to discover the seat of his trouble. They could find no disease nor organic disorder; neither could they stay the ebbing life. When missionaries and native Chris- tians from all over Assam were gathered together in Nowgong for a conference for which Mr. Moore had made preparations, news of the good man’s going Home was received by wire. A thousand men and women sobbed together; from the cor- ners, the center, the rear and front of the great grass tabernacle, proud men arose crushed, hum- bled and penitent, declaring that they had killed him with their false pride, that they had broken his heart with their waywardness; leaders of factions in the strife and divisions, sought one another and begged forgiveness; secret sins were confessed, a better life was pledged and the burden of every man’s sob was, “‘ He loved me so, and I didn’t de- serve it; now I can never repay him.” A grave was dug in the well-kept English ceme- tery where are laid to rest a few score planters, officials and missionaries. A prominent Moham- medan of the town sought for audience with those in charge of the funeral arrangements and begged that the ashes be laid, not amongst foreign but with the Indian dead, “ for,” said the Mohammedan, 62 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM “he lived for us; he lived most of his life with us; he died for us; let him be buried with us. He would so have had it.” Even so was it done, for when the brother returned from Calcutta with the urn of ashes, he said that some time before his illness Mr. Moore had requested that in the event of his death, he be rolled in a bamboo mat and buried in the native Christian cemetery. So the Hindus claimed him in his cremation, and Moham- medans and Christians in his burial. The day of the funeral, schools, court-house and government offices were closed and Hindu, Mo- hammedan and Christian officials and coolies, joined in loving tribute and walked in the proces- sion to the open field where the Christian dead are buried. There in a flower-lined grave they placed the ashes of Pitt H. Moore, who had loved them unto the end. So passed the missionary-hero who did not strive nor cry; neither did any man hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed did he not break, and smoking flax did he not quench, but in love and patience, like Enoch of old, “ he walked with God and was not, for God took him.” This type of Christian worker and lover is the dominant type on every mission-field. But more than in any native Christian or fellow- missionary, is the young missionary apt to be dis- appointed in himself. With at least a fair degree of training, with high and holy hope, he dedicates himself and all his abilities to a high task. He THE WETTEST LAND 63 goes forth yearning for an opportunity to sacrifice, to burn out in service for Christ. He is sometimes disappointed to find himself housed in a com- fortable, screened bungalow rather than the rude shelter he had imagined would be his home. He is inclined to be impatient with the measure of social formalities imposed by residence in a Eu- ropean colony of officials, planters, and commer- cial men, when he longs for more time to establish points of contact with the natives. He chafes against mission red-tape as an untrained colt chafes at bridle and saddle. He frets under re- strictions necessitated by an Oriental attitude toward sex. His patience is ravelled by native procrastination and sloth. He rebels against es- tablished methods, resents the Easterner’s dislike of change, and even more fiercely resents every semblance of Orientalism that stamps his fellows long-resident in the country. Perhaps most of all he dislikes the general European attitude towards these subject brown people. Tasks multiply and more and more little duties that he had not counted on, drain the time and strength dedicated to the great task, and encroach upon the time he had set aside for quiet and communion with his Lord. Then there comes a night in the valley of humiliation. He realizes that he has failed: failed to learn of those he came to teach; failed to profit by the wisdom of those long-experienced in the 64 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM task; failed to remain entirely free of the patron- izing manner he so keenly resented when he first detected it in others. He knows that sentient hands of brown men have handled him, that noth- ing has escaped the calm eyes that have been tak- ing his measure, or the patient ears that have sounded his depth. He knows that in patience and love and understanding, he has failed brown brother and white colleague,—that as he was dis- appointed in them, so, too, have they been disap- pointed in him. “They made me the keeper of the vineyards: but mine own vineyard have I not kept.” Slowly stars of promise and resolve lighten the gloom until a morning of clearer vision dawns. He sees that the big task is made up of small duties done in a noble way; that the sacri- fices to be made are not necessarily of a sanitary house and many of the comforts of life, but the more subtle sacrifice of cherished ideas and per- sonal opinions; that not always is the missionary called to the loneliness and privation of Living- stone’s pioneer career, but often is challenged to live in Christian love and fellowship, in close quar- ters with other strong natures not in all things in accord with his own. As he mingles with those in the European colony he finds that there are white men, too, on his foreign field with hearts feeling after God. He comes to regard mission red-tape as a necessary voucher for well-meaning folk in the homeland who question the wisdom and THE WETTEST LAND 65 honesty of their representatives abroad. He sees that in this foreign land he has much to learn as well as much to teach. Brightest of all the lights in this new dawn is the conviction that there need be no more nights in the valley of humiliation if part of every day is spent alone with Him in Whose service he is engaged. The establishment of a kindergarten and board- ing department occupied most of my first term of service. The purpose of the kindergarten was to try to wedge into the indifference of Hinduism and Mohammedanism, seemingly untouched after sev- enty years of mission work. The boarding-school was designed to gather for training in Christian living, home-making, and school-work, some of the most promising girls from the little Christian vil- lages in the foot-hills forty-two to seventy miles from Gauhati. The old Indian boarding-school* was harshly criticised as a denationalizing institution. In the old schools the students were usually housed in a single large dormitory with cement floors; they slept on iron cots, their food was prepared in one portion for the whole school and their clothing was sent outside to be laundered. Many of our Chris- tian evangelists and teachers preferred to marry * The substance of what appears on this, and the two fol- lowing pages, is contained in a booklet entitled Satribari School which I wrote for distribution by The Board of Mis- sionary Cooperation, Northern Baptist Convention.—E. M. H. 66 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM uneducated girls rather than take a wife whose training in such a boarding-school unfitted her for . happy, helpful living in the typical Indian home— a little house of mud walls and floor, beds of bamboo and a rounded hole in the ground for a stove. The old boarding-school girl did not know how to keep the mud floors beautiful with the smear of thin mud; after having slept some years on a woven spring mattress, she was not easily reconciled to the hard bamboo bed; neither did she know how to cook in small family portions, nor how to keep the clothing of her household clean. Trying to overcome these difficulties, we grouped our students into families and provided for them in typical Indian fashion. Just within the Gauhati municipal boundary, we secured about twenty-six acres of land on part of which we built a small model Christian village, with typical Indian homes, thatch roof, mud floors and walls, bamboo beds, etc. Each cottage has two bedrooms of six beds each and two occupants to a bed. The center or third room of each cot- tage is a living-room or study-room. This living- room is common to the two families occupying the cottage. Each family has its own little storeroom for vegetables and the weekly supply of rice, also a room in the cook-shed where the meals are pre- pared and eaten. Ten or twelve girls constitute a family. One of the number, an older girl, is chosen as house-mother, and another, house-auntie. THE WETTEST LAND 67 The house-mother is responsible for the expendi- ture of the weekly allowance for vegetables and for the assignment and proper performance of the cooking, cleaning and general work of the house and yard. Other important members of the family group are the babies and their mothers. For each family has a family baby—sometimes a babe in arms, sometimes a couple of months or more than a year old. The babies are the most im- portant part of the scheme. They have done more than any other agency for the development of the beautiful in our girls. The baby-mother is responsible for feeding, bathing, and the general care of her little one, dressing and putting her to bed, washing and mending for her. Faithlessness to her trust entails its forfeiture both for house mothers and baby mothers. Over all the families, as a sort of grandmother, is a capable, understand- ing Indian Christian widow, the mother of thirteen children of her own. When, as frequently hap- pens, a young man comes to the school seeking for a wife, I always considered as ineligible those girls that have failed to show interest in or love for the babies in the school or have in any way neglected the little ones committed to their care. There is a very healthy and helpful rivalry be- tween the various baby mothers and also between the various house mothers and families for the best prepared food, the neatest house, the shiniest brass vessels in the cook-house, the trimmest gar- 68 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM dens, tidiest personal appearance, etc. The plan has worked wonderfully well. It has been fol- lowed in our new mission boarding-school at Golo- ghat and has met with unstinted praise and the unqualified approval of the Indians, missionaries and government. But most of all is it commended by the fruit it has produced in the lives of the girls. In that first term there were several thrilling experiences that I had all but forgotten until I read the following letters that my home folk failed to consign to the waste-paper basket: Gauhati, (8) May, 1913. Dear Nettie: I’d give much to have you see the Indian jug- glers. They are clever! About ten days ago we had one do his tricks for boarders and day pupils. This fellow was as good as I have seen. He made smoke and fire come from his mouth, not for a second, but for fully two minutes. I tried to snap it, but it was among my blistered films. He did more than half of his tricks on the schoolmaster, which added to their interest for the children. He showed us a round tin box with a funnel- shaped top. We all looked into it. The school- master stuck his nose in. It was empty; it was sound and without an inner lining, so far as we could judge. The juggler filled it with water and THE WETTEST LAND 69 then poured water out and poured it out, but the box remained always full and overflowing. The pundit saw that the box was still full of water and fastened the lid on. Then he held his hand out when the juggler immediately turned the can up- side down, pulled off the lid, but instead of the water and splash that we expected, out came a snake and shriek when the pundit felt it in his hand. The snake was put back and the lid put on, but when it was pulled off again, instead of a snake there were quantities of fragrant temple lilies,—so many tumbled out that they had to be jammed to get into the tin again. For an hour we enjoyed other tricks just as wonderful and knew that three rupees was good pay for the performer. Nowgong, Assam. Dear Friend-W ho-Couldn’t-Come: ; Last week I had another ox-cart ride. Mrs. Kampfer did not really need me any longer, as she and the baby are doing nicely, so I went back to Nowgong, taking Profulla with me. Pro- fulla means Gladness, and this chubby child of four or five years is well named. She seems a composite of the ripple and gurgle of the streams of the hill country in which she was born and of the warmth and glow of the sunlight of the plains where she has flirted and frolicked through the years of babyhood. The resultant is a charming mixture of quiet shyness streaked with short sea- 70 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM sons of cuddling and affection; reserve and wide distance maintained with strangers but a winsome familiarity and outpouring of confidential chatter for those whom she elects as friends. The child’s voice possesses such rare sweetness, that often I lose the sense of her rambles by listening to their music. Profulla’s almond eyes set in a broad flat face proclaim her Mongolian descent. She is a Naga,—a tribe of fearless hill-people living at China’s back door. We left Gauhati about noon of an intolerably hot day. For six hours we sat on the sunny side of the railway carriage. An Eurasian bridal couple sat on the shady side of the carriage and they an- noyed me even more than the heat. Not because they had the shady side of the carriage, but be- cause they sat at the extreme ends of the seat with seating room for three or four between them. Al- though Profulla, busy with the sights to be seen from the windows, politely turned her back to her fellow-passenngers and I buried myself in a magazine, nevertheless that bridal couple sat not one mite closer! In six hours, they exchanged exactly six remarks; it may be that they had lim- ited themselves to one remark an hour, for both bride and groom wore wrist-watches which they studiously scanned every few minutes. At Chaparmuk we changed from the railroad carriage to the ox-cart. Mr. Moore was at the station to see us safely in the cart before he took THE WETTEST LAND 71 the train for upper Assam. My suitcase and par- cels were stowed in front of the cart behind the driver’s seat and Profulla and I climbed into the back of the cart. The driver, a mere boy, yoked the oxen, and we jolted on our way. When a friendly cloud hid the sun we scrambled from the cart and walked several miles under wonderful sunset clouds with lights and shadows playing on field and jungle, clothing the Mikir Hills with that indescribable blue haze with which Nature weaves evening dress for her high places. While the sky still retained some of the glow of evening embers, Venus sparkled pure and gold in her bed of blue: almost immediately every vestige of colour disappeared from the clouds, leaving Venus’ bright rays to reflect fallen gems in every stream and flooded place. Other stars were faintly twinkling; Arcturus was sliding down the west- ern horizon hard upon the lost sun; Vega and Altair were shining bright and clear west of the zenith where the cross of Cygnus was spread. There was no moon. Before Auriga was well over the east it became densely dark, seemingly in a moment. We had walked quite a distance, so climbed into the cart again. Profulla chatted until she fell asleep. Then I wanted more than ever to get out and watch the lightning as it tore livid rents in the black sky. I leaned from the cart ready to jump when I thought about snakes. I do not know just what 72 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM effect storms have upon these gliding creatures, and it was very, very dark, except when the light- ning flashed. Much as I love storms in the open, more do I fear snakes in the dark, so I stayed in the cart. That was a regal storm such as fre- quently marks the end of the monsoon. For hours the thunder cannonaded with echoing rumbles in the hills. The lightning was vividly sharp and al- most incessant. It struck trees which crashed to the ground in beds of broken branches and twigs. After the fury of the storm had abated, the rain came in torrents. Wind, thunder and lightning still raged with tropic passion, but not with the madness of the first onslaught. Exhausted by the excitement of the day, Profulla slept soundly. We must have been in the storm several hours, when one of the oxen threw the yoke and in doing so, set the cart at right angles with the road. We were backed towards a body of water which I sup- posed was a flooded rice-field. The cart wheels were perilously near the edge of the bank. Ifthe cart should receive the slightest impetus in that direction, it would roll down into the water. The driver was dancing on the fork of the cart trying to reach the balky beast with a stick. If he con- tinued such capers, either he or the oxen would have us in the water or turned over in the mud. The only vernacular I can speak is Assamese, and as yet I’m not very fluent in that. The driver spoke only Hindustani and could not understand THE WETTEST LAND 713 Assamese. I called to him to jump to the ground to manage his beasts. Of course he did not under- stand me. I straddled Profulla across my hip, after the Assamese fashion of carrying their young, and started for the front of the cart, in- tending to jump to the ground. Just then the boy pulled the balking ox against the cart with a thud. The other ox slipped from under the yoke and sent the cart rolling down, down, the bank into the water. Incidentally it put out the lantern which had hung from the bottom of the cart, and left us in dense darkness, except for the lightning. The tongue of the cart was em- bedded in the slime and mud of the bank. An ox- cart is quite high even when standing level, and our baggage, placed in the front of the cart, tilted it towards the tongue, so raising the back of the wagon; nevertheless water came into the cart at the back. There was a strong, swift, storm-fed current. It was not a rice-field, but a river,—the Noi Kolung—freighted with the debris of the storm. Flashes of lightning showed that it was quite wide. It was impossible to stay in the cart. At any moment it might assume its natural posi- tion when unyoked, and tip backwards in spite of the baggage weighting the front. I did not relish the prospects of being dumped in a heap out into the river, with a little one to care for and probably some baggage beside the mattress and cart tum- bled on top of us. The wind rendered the um- 74 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM brella useless even if we could have bothered with it. Our clothing was already saturated. The driver sat at the head of the cart wailing as only an Oriental can. I climbed over the baggage, car- rying Profulla pig-a-back, walked on the tongue of the cart through the water to the bank. Time and again while climbing the clay bank we slipped back grasping a broken twig or a handful of up- rooted grass and mud, but finally, muddy and drenched, we reached the road. The lightning revealed clusters of banana-trees and betel-palms in the distance. In the jungle, banana and betel trees are signs of habitation, so we started in the direction of the sighted trees, Profulla walking alongside and clinging to my skirts as she scolded the driver. Only once when the lightning was unusually sharp, she clung to my skirts and begged to be carried. When the light- ning flashed we would run as far as it revealed the way. In the dark we stood still and waited. Deep puddles flooded the jungle-path, but we waded right through them, for we were already drenched and a little more wet did not matter. The first path branching from the road seemed to lead nowhere, but the lightning revealed build- ings beyond us, so we returned to the road and took the second path which led to a little native hut and two unwalled bullock sheds. We knocked at the bamboo door and called and called, explain- ing that our cart had been backed into the river CROSSING THE BOKO RIVER IN A QUEEN’S CHAIR “MY FOUR ADOPTED BROWNIES” oa ass ‘ THE WETTEST LAND 75 and we were seeking shelter from the storm. We waited what seemed a long time but no answer came, although we heard voices within. The driver must have been frightened after we left him, for after a while he appeared in the bullock shed and knocked on the hut door saying many things in Hindustani. But the door remained shut and the hut was still dark. The bullock shed was tiny, crowded with bullocks, and leaked, so the earthen floors were a sorry mess. Voices were again heard in the hut and a ray of light showed through a hole made in the bamboo door for a chain. We renewed our appeals and waited. Finally the door opened a little way and a fright- ened man with a little lamp held in the shade of his hand asked in Assamese what we wanted. At the sound of Assamese I gathered confidence and courage, for I know the vernacular well enough to understand all that he said and to make myself understood after a fashion. Sometimes more than. a common means of speech is necessary to under- standing, however, and it was so in this case. I could not understand that under such circum- stances one human being should have to beg an- other for aid and that it would be denied seemed incredible. But this man would not let us into his house. He would not help the cartman with the cart. He would help in the morning if I gave him a rupee. Then I asked for a lantern or light of some kind. He did not have a lantern. The 76 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM native lamp that he held in his hand was a little cup cut from empty kerosene tins, with tiny tin pipe-stem opening in the center of the top through which the rag wick is drawn. When I asked him for one of these, he appeared with another of the little shadeless tins that sell for a cent each and said that he would lend us one, but how was he to know that we would return it. I had no money but remembered my cameo ring. I took it off and thrusting it at the man told him that it was worth many rupees and hundreds of tin lamps. Still holding the lamp, he put the ring as far on his hand as it would go. Ina rage I seized upon the lamp and shouted above the storm, ‘‘ You’re a mean, mean man! Sometime you will be in trouble and I hope many, many people will help you and make you ashamed of yourself for your meanness to us tonight.”’ In my excitement I mixed English and Assamese indiscriminately. The fellow may have thought I cursed him. He declared himself to be a good man, drew the ring from his finger, said he did not want it and insisted upon my tak- ing it back. We carried the lamp back to the cart, the wind blowing it out on the way. There were only two matches left in the driver’s store. Because of the wind blowing the lamp we could not stay under the trees. We had to risk the cart which was still upright. Drawing the baggage a little further toward the front, Profulla and I sat on it to help THE WETTEST LAND £4) weight the forepart of the cart. Finding the driver’s tobacco box (an empty condensed milk can) hanging to the side of the cart at the front, I threw the tobacco into the river and dropped the lamp into the empty can to protect it from the wind. The wick above the pipe stem had burned out, the flame flickered and we were again in dark- ness and without matches. Suddenly I remem- bered having part of a box of matches in my hand- bag, I did not dare risk tilting the cart by reach- ing back for the bag, but fished for it with the tip of my umbrella. Fortunately, it was a leather bag lined with dog skin; though the outside of the bag was soaked the box of matches was dry. There were about a dozen matches in it. We pinched the burnt wick, put the lamp back into the empty can and relighted it. Suddenly the storm calmed somewhat. It still rained, but not torrentially; the lightning was no longer sharp; the wind did not blow. The driver started off gesticulating as he poured forth vol- umes of Hindustani. I had no idea as to what he meant to do, where he was going or why. Neither did I know where we were. In the Noi Kolung, of course, but in what part of the Noi Kolung? We might have been just outside Nowgong or only half-way there. I did not know whether it was midnight or nearly morning. The sky gave no promise of dawn though the twilight seemed ages past. I knew that the little lamp could not burn 78 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM much longer. Profulla shivered with the cold. I wrapped her in the driver’s wet blanket for it was the driest thing at hand. Then we waited. Every kind of creature seemed disturbed. There were heavy splashes in the river all around us. They might have been caused by dropping brush or by fish, but they might just as well have been crocodiles or sharks, so I kept the closed umbrella in my hand pointed at the rear cart opening, de- termined that anything that might swim into the back of the cart should swallow the umbrella be- fore it did us. The water noises seemed to be augmented. Black shapes glided down the river. It would be better to wait on land even without the light. But just then jackals came howling and yelling that weird cry that savours so strangely of the laugh-sob of hysterics. The pack came yelping nearer than I cared to hear them. Frogs croaked. A bird gave a shrill shriek. I pictured it being stung by a snake. After all, it was prob- ably safer in the cart. Profulla went to sleep again on my lap. Slowly the time dragged on while I pondered what men did and how they lived before fire and artificial lights were used. The intermittent gleam of fireflies showed beautifully in the dark that brooded over land and water. Then I began to think how very much worse things might have been: had the cart tilted back- wards into the water, had there been no matches in the handbag, had there been no hut near the THE WETTEST LAND 79 road, had there been a hungry tiger in the jungle (for this is famous tiger territory). Then the funny side of the affair began to appear. How terrified you home-folk would be if you could know of my plight! What would you not give for a glimpse of me huddled in a corner of such a queer houseboat, with a brown baby snugly sleeping in my arms! I smiled broadly in the dark. Time passed more quickly. ‘The sounds were not so alarming as they had been. Prospects were not hopeless. The experience would afford lots of fun afterwards. Why, it seemed like being a really truly missionary, with “ journeyings often, in perils of water, in perils in the wilderness, in weariness, in watchings often.” No, on the whole it was not half bad, and— The driver came back with a cart and a hurri- cane lantern with but little oil in it and a chimney so filthy that only a flicker of light could pierce through. The cart had nothing but broken nail- heads over the rough, bare floor, but it seemed luxurious. A bullock cart passed and we called to the driver for help, but his only reply was to drive a little faster. With difficulty we transferred the suitcase to the new cart and started for Now- gong, leaving the cart, mattress and other things to their fate. We reached our journey’s end as the clock struck four. Though Profulla had seemed not at all phased by the storm, she lost her nerve when taken out 80 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM to the dormitory where about fifty strange little brown girls were sleeping, and would not be paci- fied until allowed to come into the bungalow and sleep on a pallet near the one she knew. That was the most destructive storm of the sea- son. Many large trees on the mission compound had been destroyed, and the town was littered with fallen trees and uprooted brush. The next day the cart was rescued. I had several notes of condolence from friends who grieved that I had met such a severe storm on the road, but never dreamed that I had spent part of the night on (or was it in?) the Noi Kolung. V SOME LETTERS FROM THE FIELD chapter to letters written home at various times. They describe intimately the various experiences which were mine at the time they were written, and have the value of being impressions of the time rather than observations made in long retrospect: | PROPOSE to devote practically this entire April 6, 1913. My Dear Ones: If you could look in on us this morning you would wonder what has happened. Curtains and pictures down, tables and chairs piled up, soaked rugs spread out-of-doors, school furniture and sup- plies piled on the veranda, the children’s things hanging all about, the organ with its leather cover curled up ready to shed and the wood crinkled as with a curling iron. All these things piled on the back veranda as in a storage room for rubbish, the other parts of the house without a stick of furniture, yard of drapery or bit of carpet, but floors covered with the muddy tracks of boots and brooms, the walls drenched and the wet plaster making the place ill-smelling. You see we had a tornado Saturday night. Some of the hailstones, weighed afterwards on the scales, were a quarter 81 82 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM to a half-pound each. They pelted our asbestos roof and riddled it like so many bullets. The tor- rents poured through these holes and came through the ceiling at such a rate that walking through the front rooms was like walking through a drenching rain. The wind tore the screening from the front veranda, uprooted great trees and twisted off the branches of others as though they had been so many pieces of pottery. The schoolhouse roof was lifted on one side, curled as hair around a finger, and thrown off to the side. ‘Then the stones punched holes in the 4 x 6 foot composition black- board that we had made last week, and the wind wrenched it from its frame and hurled it out-of- doors like useless chaff. A large supply wardrobe was thrown on its face. The supports for the flower-boxes in the kindergarten gave way and the boxes fell,—kindling and soil mixing with broken glass, fallen pictures and torn curtains, in one grand, hasty pudding. At the very beginning of the havoc, the light- ning tossed about fifteen feet off the top of a huge teak tree between the house and the girls’ cottage, as one flecks a crumb from a table. As it fell the tree crashed against the wall of the girls’ house, knocking it in just where the girls sleep. For- tunately, their heads were on the inner end of their pallets. The mothers grabbed their babies, the bigger girls took the smaller ones and rushed down stairs. Four of the girls were in the bungalow LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 83 with me and when the storm started and the tree crashed Proba rushed over to the bungalow, but we could scarcely force the door of the screen- porch open to let her in. She was only a foot or two from me and I yelled with all my strength, but the hail had set in with such din, while the thunder, crashing trees and falling glass made so much noise that we couldn’t hear our own voices. The hailstones fell with such force that they re- bounded from the ground and it seemed that light- ning and hail both were coming up from the earth as well as down from above. When I could get out to the cottage the girls were all huddled together, the larger girls carry- ing the smaller ones. The matron and many of the larger girls were weeping hysterically, but the little children were wide-eyed, but quiet and with- out sign of a tear. In the bungalow we were like drowned rats with the water above our ankles, so we couldn’t bring the girls in here. Just as soon as the storm permitted them to get out, Mr. Stephen and the coachman came to see if we were all right and what they could do to help us out. We went over to the Stephen bungalow and slept there, or rather lay down on the floor and talked until it was light enough to get out and see what damage had been done. We were hardly settled in the bungalow when the chief Government of- ficial came to see if there were any casualties on our compound. It is a marvel that but five people 84 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM were killed by falling houses or pelting stones. Many were bruised with the hailstones, but were saved serious injury by crawling under the bamboo beds when the stones cut through the thatch roof. The next morning we were up at dawn, and such havoc on all sides! Half of the big trees on our compound were down, and all through the town there were so many uprooted trees that they had to dynamite them and get a couple hundred prisoners out to clear them from the roads. A great rubber tree in which a community of flying foxes stay, crashed to the ground killing several score of these.loathsome, ill-smelling creatures that are neither bird nor beast. Frogs and rats lay where a stone had struck them. Birds were wail- ing for their nests and young. The ground bore deep pockmarks of hail. The poor houses of the coolie class were heaped piles of rubbish, their oc- cupants happily fishing in the flooded gutters and fields, or gathered in groups reporting their feel- ings and experiences of the night before and agree- ing that not even from their fathers’ fathers had they ever heard of such a storm. Some people prayed that night who do not usually have evening prayers. The roads were impassable for wheeled vehicles, but we saddled our ponies, went over or around the heaps of debris in the road, and looked up most of our outside school children to see if any were in LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 85 distress. We think that the storm was quite local and that none of our other stations were hurt. Gauhati, Feb; 3, 1913: . . Last week an anxious mother came to in- quire why her boy plays so much in school and is whipped so little! Last week I was out two after- noons visiting in the homes and hearing the chorus, “Whip them more, Missahib!” This afternoon I was talking to my perpetually bad girl. The only good she does is in promising, but there is some- thing about the child that I love. I stood her in a corner this afternoon and when I was talking with her after school, trying to show her the folly of making promises only to break them and telling her that she could not come to school unless she behaves and lets those around her behave, she told me with sober sobbing that if I would only whip her hard she might be good! Wonderful East! Zenana Mission House, Darjeeling, August 12, 1913. Dear Home-folk: . . Have I written you about our trip to see the sunrise on Everest? I don’t mean that we went to Everest, but last Wednesday morning I was up at quarter past one and waited until quar- ter of four for my pony and the rest of the party. 86 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM I had a splendid spirited pony that was so impa- tient to go that he wouldn’t be still while I mounted, so I had to gallop off with my stirrup a little too short. Oh, but it was a glorious ride— uphill most of the way. The beast went like the wind, leaving the others one by one, quite far be- hind. I guess he doesn’t often have a burden as light as eighty-nine pounds to carry. There was a wind stirring and enough sharpness in the air to make one’s blood tingle. As we galloped through the cantonments at Jalaphar the sentinel chal- lenged me, but I hadn’t time to shout, ‘‘ I’m going to Tiger Hill,” before the pony was off madly, again. Just as the morning star dimmed I crossed the little settlement at Ghoom, which lies between the hill I had crossed and the one I had yet to climb. I feared the pink of dawn would appear before I reached the hilltop, so I let the pony have the lines and go his own pace. He, too, seemed possessed by the spirit of the morning so galloped most of the way. When we reached the observation platform on top of the hill, the sky was aglow and the nearer snows shone between two banks of clouds... . Dawn flooded the plains below with their great swollen rivers lying like thin strands of silver across the land. The grand line of snow peaks was covered with every roseate shade and flecked with gold and hints of green. The clouds shifted and moved sometimes in filmy mists, sometimes LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 87 in huge masses, with white fleecy bits snuggled here and there on great mountain bosoms, all con- tinually changing shape and catching different colours. We watched the shifting masses until the sun was quite strong. Kanchanjanga was ma- jestic, so dazzlingly white in the sun that she seemed a great scintillating jewel. But Everest did not show that morning. I was sorry, for some who watched with us will probably not have an- other opportunity to see this peerless peak, and were but little consoled when those of us who have seen it, explained that from this point of observa- tion, it can not compare in grandeur with any of the dozen glistening crowns that we were look- ing at. Timi, Sikim, India, October 6, 1913. Dear Ones at Home: . . . Eighteen miles on my circuitous trip home to Gauhati. Timi is twenty-six miles from Dar- jeeling. The road is as many miles of every variety of beauty. We left Darjeeling, Thursday about four P. M. and were entertained at a tea- garden about six miles out, or rather down, for the road was all down hill, and in some places so steep that there were stone stairways. Of course we didn’t ride over these, but it was too grotesque to see the syces leading the ponies down. After a bit the poor creatures’ ankles knocked together so 88 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM that you would think they couldn’t go on. We had sent the coolies on ahead with our baggage, but when we arrived at Mrs. Shannon’s we found that the coolies had not yet come. It was about seven and quite dark except for good starlight. We had tea according to the English custom of re- freshing guests, and sat on the veranda until eight, waiting for the coolies, for knowing that these people dress for dinner we had each packed a dinner-dress. But when the baggage hadn’t come at eight, we went to our room, washed up and put back our soiled clothes for dinner. The English seem to go in for silver so much more than we do, but do not use cut-glass as much, probably because the servants break so much. They serve their meals in delightful style. After dinner we had a few games and then to bed. In the morning we walked around the garden before breakfast, and such a lovely garden it was! The shady side of the hill faces the snows, and here Mr. Shannon has set out masses of ferns and orchids. It is one of the most beautiful bits of garden I have ever seen. These people are very fond of their garden; both of them are botanists. They watch the birds and have learned about them; they collect butterflies; they entertain those who cannot return their hospitality. After break- fast Mr. Shannon walked with us several miles through his garden on to the Government road. Then the way lay through a forest, and such but- LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 89 terflies we saw! Large as birds, some seemed; some were black with bars of white and other colours, some brilliantly hued. As we continued downhill it became warmer and warmer until we reached the river that separates Bengal from Sikim. Here we mounted the horses that had been sent on before, and started up the mountain on the other side of the river. About four o’clock we reached the dak bungalow where we were to spend the night. It is the great puja time, when most natives work little and drink much. The coolies had left the bridge before us and should have reached the bungalow shortly after we did. After having waited for them more than an hour, we decided to go to the bazaar and try to find something to eat as we had had noth- ing since morning. A crowd of curious people tagged after us in the bazaar, but no one could tell us where we might get fruit or eggs, so we went back to the bungalow empty-handed, washed our hands without soap, dried them on our petti- coats, and went to bed. I woke up to hear dishes rattle. The coolies had arrived and we ate and ate, and drank and drank. After the cool of Darjeeling, the place seemed close and stuffy. There was but one window; the door was half off its hinges. Knowing that the natives were all drinking and that we were the only Europeans anywhere about, I took two big hat-pins and put them by my pillow. Neither of 90 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM us slept very much. We were up about six in the morning, had breakfast, packed the bedding and left the village about nine. The rest of the jour- ney lay almost entirely through forests. It was shady and got cooler and cooler as we ascended. About noon we came to the second valley and began another descent. This road was darker and damper than the one we had come. It was too hard on the ponies to ride them down such steep grades, so we dismounted and fed them while waiting for the syces to come. Then we saw that we had stirred up leeches. One pony had about twenty around his mouth and ever so many others on his head and feet. We, too, had the things pac- ing their queer way over our boots. Between the soles and about the tongue they had made their way inside. We daren’t sit down to take off our shoes, so one supported the other while we hunted out the clingers. The last of the walk downhill was very wearying so tea, served as soon as we arrived, was very refreshing. The place here is beautiful. The snows are nearer than at Darjeeling. The second range that we see from our bedroom is snow-capped. In front of the house is a high hill across a narrow valley through which a stream flows as a silver girdle. On either side of the foremost hill are spurs and saddles of several ranges. Here the clouds perpetually chase light and shade; it is ever varying, always lovely. Mrs. MacKean, our hos- LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 91 tess, fits wonderfully well in this mountain setting. She is big in her spirit, natural in her manner and an ideal helpmeet for a lonely frontier missionary. There is a little girl almost six and as interesting as free life in these marvelous hills can make a child who has wise, cultured parents. Gauhati, Assam, Feb. 17, 1914. You Dear-People-Who-Are-Home: . . Pve just concluded one of the most inter- esting of all my interesting experiences. I’ve been out in the district! . . . I didn’t get my home letter off last week, because there is only a weekly post from the place where we were, and that was too late for the foreign mail. In fact the post never finds Barigaon, the village where we stayed for the Association, but the men carry the mail once a week about eight miles into the bazaar, and get the village mail for the week at the same time. I took our big girl, Sumuri, and the baby and left here Tuesday about three P. M. About fif- teen miles out Isabelle met us with the American wagon. We rested at the dak bungalow for the night and were up the next morning at four-thirty and away on the road again by six. There is only one seat, and the baggage occupies the back of the wagon, so we took turns riding on the seat and on the baggage. We passed scores of people carry- ing, on either end of a long shoulder-stick, bamboo 92 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM baskets of greens, silk cocoons, pottery and other wares, to a large weekly bazaar in a nearby tea- garden. About one o’clock we came to the river where we transferred ourselves and baggage into a dug- out, i. e., a hollowed tree-trunk, and made the rest of the journey by water. It is when I am see- ing beautiful bits of country that I fairly ache to have you at home see them with me. It is not when things are sad or hard that I am smitten with loneliness, but when there is something glad or beautiful, that I yearn to have you share it with me. . . . There are low, dipping foothills on both sides of the river, and more or less jungle on the skirting road. At first the midday glare marred perfect enjoyment, but later in the afternoon the hills cast long shadows on the water and draped themselves in purple, the wild cocks crowed as they went to nest, and mating birds singing ves- pers made the evening melodious. It was moon- light when we landed on the sands of Barigaon and a short walk across the sandy stretch brought us to the village proper and to dear faithful Rhanji with supper ready to be served. They had built us a basha of grass and bam- boos, of one large room with the back screened off by grass and built up with a bamboo platform with a layer of rice straw on top. This platform was at once our bed and bedroom. The front of the grass partition served as living- and dining- LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 93 room. Here, too, a carpet of straw protected us from the cold earth. Whenever our living-room failed to accommodate the crowds that visited us, the people on the outside parted the dried grass walls with their hands and thrust their heads through. Our living-room opened onto our bath- room, a little grass room about as large as a good- sized packing-case and without a lid. One side of this was furnished with a little bamboo platform that served as bathtub. We stood on this and poured water over our soaped bodies. Oh, it was life in the rough, but it was interesting! My heart yearned for the women and children. It is always upon these that heathenism places its heaviest blight. For the Garo village woman, life is a long day of labour with a short night of rest. They dry the rice and pound it to free it from the husk, they carry water from the stream and wood from the jungle, they cook, smear the floors with mud, gather silkworms from the jungle, feed them, spin and weave. In the garden-season the women transplant the young rice plants and help cut the ripened grain. Nevertheless, some of them have very sweet womanly faces,—such faces as the Gospel produces among all peoples. There were many, many things that were new to me. I saw more of the Gospel’s accomplish- ments in that one week than I had seen in the three years in Gauhati station. Those men led their meetings, elected their officers and conducted 94 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM their business along proper parliamentary lines. . . The sad part is that the men seem advanced so far beyond the women that they cannot be com- rades in many things. Truly, it is only in Christ Jesus that there is neither male nor female. The men are decently clothed, for the most part. Often they wear a coat or blanket in addition to their shirt, and sometimes they have shoes and stock- ings; whereas the women usually have only a sack- like garment coming from under the arms to mid- way between the knees and ankles; at night they wear cotton over the upper part of the body, but very seldom a bodice or shirt, almost never a coat, blanket or shawl, and never shoes and stock- ings. While I shivered in my heavy coat in the cold night-fogs, the women sitting all around me took off the covering from their shoulders to wrap it about some of their little children that slept at their feet, leaving their own shoulders and bosom exposed to the cold. These same hard-worked, ill-dressed women have paid very nearly fifty dollars to send eight girls chosen from different churches of the district to our boarding-school. These people are so poor that it is almost impossible for them to pay any- thing as individuals. They will make more effort to educate their boys, but they are not used to the thought of educating a girl. And Rhanji,—oh! I love the honest, generous, loving heart under his brown skin! Rhanji gets sixteen rupees a month LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 95 and is going to keep four of his nieces in school, paying six rupees for their board and finding all their clothes, books, and supplies. Rhanji is an inspiring joy. As we were coming home with the girls, I walked behind Rhanji on the trail, and the dear, baby-loving bachelor confided to me these big thoughts, “ You know, Missahib, these girls going into school mean more than we see today. They will go in and get things that are good to know; then they will come back and slowly, slowly, the village will have what the girls got in school; and another year more girls will go from other villages and they will get these things to share in their villages; and then it will be with us something as it is with the sahibs and memsahibs in the house.” He meant, I think, that then Garo husbands and wives will share all things, even their thoughts, as missionary husbands and wives do. Gauhati, Assam, March 24, 1916. Dear Little Mother: . . . Last week there was a great Hindu festival on. I have always heard it spoken of as the red powder puja, because red powder is thrown on pedestrians much as flour used to be thrown by children at Hallowe’en at home. This is supposed to be the most obscene of Hindu festivals, one about which one is constantly warned not to ask questions. It is the principal festival of the year 96 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM | in the section in which our Hindu pundit lives. People of that region treasure their specially fine cloths, loom-parts, brassware, ivory and other pro- duce to exhibit and sell at this time. I have long wanted to visit the pundit’s home and so get an inside view of Hindu life, and this holiday was my last opportunity to do so before going home; so I went. It was decided that I must have one of the ser- vants go with me in case anything happened. The bearer was sent but missed the early morning train, so the pundit and I started off alone. And yet not alone, either, for every available inch of space in the whole train was taken before we left Gauhati. People were even crowded in the bag- gage car, a closed steel compartment without win- dows. It was a local train, and at every station along the way there were frantic scrambles for places—the people inside, screaming lest they be mashed in the jam, and beating back those on the outside who tried to force their way into the al- ready overcrowded space. The guards shoved in passengers wherever they could get a footing. We left the train at a little sun-baked station, supposedly five miles from the village. It was about half-past twelve and very, very hot. A young elephant and a pony were waiting at the station, and I was to take my choice of the ani- mals. Need I say that I made the elephant kneel and make stepping stones of his various joints, up LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 97 which I climbed by the aid of his howdah rope- banister. There was not the regular howdah sort of chair that royalty and Europeans usually use when traveling by elephant, but only a plain kind of small mattress tied on with rope. We went as the birds fly—over the rice fields—shadeless, hot and dusty, but with a strong breeze. That five miles was closely related to twenty! We stopped at a Hindu village about half-way. The people gathered from nap, field and rice-pounding to stare at me. The village leader refreshed me with milk from a green cocoanut pulled while I entertained the women with pictures of Satribari and of you folk at home. None of the women and but few of the men had ever seen a white woman before. All along the road, men and women in the different villages through which we passed, asked where I was going, why I had come, and was the pundit going to have me for another wife! At the pundit’s house everything was ready to receive me. Full-grown banana trees had been cut down and planted at the entrance of the court- yard, after the approved fashion of honouring a guest. I was to occupy the prayer-house. The building was unwalled, but half of it had been screened in with portable bamboo mats and fur- nished with a chair, two tables and a bed with planks for a mattress. Some fruit was in brass dishes on a newspaper tablecloth. From the time of my arrival, Saturday about dusk, until I left 98 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM Monday morning about nine or ten o’clock, I was a source of great interest to the men, women and children. They were very curious as to my dress- ing and undressing, my eating and sleeping... . . They gathered in the morning before sunrise and separated the screens to see how I slept. I kept my eyes closed, pretending to sleep and hoping they would go away. When I turned over, this was reported by one of the watchers and others gathered to see if I would do it again. I happened to use the hand on which I wear my cameo ring to draw the covers closer over my face. This im- portant action was reported to the waiting crowd. Since my eating or cooking in any of their build- ings would have hopelessly polluted the same, they had erected a little enclosure of banana-tree stalks, with two holes in the ground for cooking. . . I knew that I would have fruit, so had brought only a bottle of malted milk and a tin of crackers, thinking these would suffice for the few days I in- tended to stay. Upon my arrival, a number of the leading men of the village were called together to decide whether or not I might be offered milk without endangering the caste of the villagers. After discussion it was decided that as I had come as a guest to the village, was thirsty and travel- worn, the warm milk might be offered me. I drank it. It is always a trial to drink cow’s milk here in India for the cows are so poorly fed that the milk tastes dirty, oily and altogether nasty. ELLA MARIE HOLMES— “One of those Foreign Missionaries” ae LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 99 In the evening my host came to me in great straits to know what could be done about giving me food. The bearer had missed the train and they could not cook anything for me, but they would send for a Mohammedan from a village a mile or more away, for Mohammedans do not have caste, so may cook for Christians. When I found out that the villagers might boil water for me without hurt- ing their caste, I assured them that with boiled water I could make malted milk and would have all that I desired and get along beautifully... . The bearer arrived that evening. In the evening the village headman, the priest, surveyor, tax-collector, and another official came to pay their respects and to see what I was like. The priest is a young man studying in a Hindu divinity school in Gauhati and home only for the holiday. He spent the first part of the evening gauging and weighing me. Evidently he decided that he could risk the ‘contamination of acquain- tance and became quite cordial, asking me to see his wife the next day. After the men left, the women and children crowded in again and I enter- tained them until about ten o’clock when we all went with the pundit’s mother to see the fireworks. It was about twenty minutes’ walk. All the rice- field paths were alive with others bent to the cen- ter field whither we were making our way. Being women, we waited at every crossing until the front path was clear of men,—this although all in our 100 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM party were very old women, women who served and do not observe purdah, or little girls who had not yet been kept in purdah. We sat down under a great tree and after a while torch-bearers came with singing and danc- ing carrying in their midst the gohain, or priestly incarnation of God. The whole crowd sang, rock- ets were fired, balloons were sent up, illuminations and set pieces lighted. Apart from photographs and elaborate set pieces, these fireworks compare very favourably with those seen on Inauguration Day and other notable occasions on the Monu- ment grounds in Washington. I supposed they had been purchased in Calcutta and was dumb- founded to find that they had been made by the villagers on the spot at a cost of about five hundred rupees. One very striking phase of the celebra- tion was the burning of a grass hut in which a goat had been bound but allowed to escape if he could as the hut blazed. I have not yet been able to learn the significance of this custom. I was tired, so about midnight asked to be ex- cused and went home with the pundit’s mother. The latter and a little girl slept on the floor in my room. I greatly alarmed the dear old lady when I kneeled to pray. Evidently she thought I was frightened or grieving and insisted upon my get- ting up from my knees! . . . They had a jungle-fowl shot for my dinner Sunday. They couldn’t touch it, so the bearer LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 101 brought it in from the jungle where it had fallen. It would have been pollution to have brought it into their courtyard so I was called outside to see it. The bearer had to take it back to the jungle to clean it and leave it there all day. He cooked it in the little house of banana stalks and I had to go out there to eat it or the pundit would have had to burn down the other house. Sunday I saw the village water-tank. It is green and foul. Everyone bathes in it when he comes to get his supply of water. There had been a scourge of smallpox in the village. More than a score of children bore the scars and on some the sores had not healed. A number had died with the disease, for there is no effort to segregate or vaccinate although the Government would have sent a government vaccinator to any village that needed it, had the people been willing to have him come. When I asked the two college men of the village why they had not insisted upon a vaccina- tor coming to them, they said that the women and ignorant people of the village would not consent to it for fear they might anger the goddess of smallpox and she send an awful scourge upon them! When I visited the women of the priest’s household, he wanted to have tea made for me, but I had decided to suffer extreme thirst rather than drink the bath-water of smallpox patients, even if it were boiled. With a pebble under my tongue, I walked miles Sunday, in great heat across un- 102 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM shaded rice-fields, visiting women in I know not how many courtyards, and talking with them until my parched tongue could scarcely move in my dried, feverish mouth. . . . At the home of the pundit’s wife, they had a feast for me. It was laid on a handkerchief spread over a beautiful chased brass tray. There was milk (probably not boiled, so not to be tasted), a hard-boiled egg that had been shelled and thumb impressions taken on the white meat, puffed rice balls dipped in syrup, some sugar candy dusty from the bazaar, and some sugar cane cut into small pieces. I nibbled a bit of the candy, but knew that I was too thirsty and water too scarce to venture much sweet, even had it been clean. I devoured every bit of the sugar-cane and for the first time found its juice refreshing. When we got back to the pundit’s house about dark, I sucked the juice from an over- ripe native melon and devoured hot milk as though it were nectar for the gods. The headman and surveyor took me to the fair grounds where the people were sacrificing to the idols. The Brah- mins here said that if I took off my shoes I might go up where they sat right in front of the idols, provided I would make an offering to them. Need- less to say, I contented myself with seeing them from a distance. There were about ten drummers and six cymbal-clangers dancing in front of the idols. They were dripping with perspiration, al- though naked to the waist. LETTERS FROM THE FIELD — 103 At night, after the men went back to the fair, I went out and sat down with the women at their evening prayers. They sing their prayers as they clap their hands, one acting as leader and the others answering her. It was altogether weird, and I was glad to steal off to bed even though later the women brought the lantern back and stood around looking at me. Monday we walked across the rice-fields to the station in one of the densest dust-storms I’ve known. I was so parched with thirst that I had to stop by the road and send the men to one of the villages to buy green cocoanuts that I might drink the milk before I could go on. You see it was the end of the long dry season with a blustery March wind to blow the dust. . . . ’'d not exchange this experience for a month or two of just ordinary living. . After five-and-a-quarter years’ service I went home on furlough, marveling at what God had wrought in spite of my failures and foolishness, and asking Him to allow me to go back again to try to do better. But I wanted to go back with my sister Nettie as self-supporting missionaries. So far as I know, in all of Assam all foreigners that are at all actively engaged in Christian ser- vice are paid workers. Several Hindus and Mo- hammedans have remarked to me that missionaries follow their vocation even as lawyers and physi- 104 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM cians follow theirs, viz., they make their living so; that unsalaried Christian foreigners such as com- mercial men, officials, travelers, do not seem to be burdened with Christian work. I have often won- dered why more Christians of independent means do not live in non-Christian lands as laymen active in Christian service. AMERICAN BAPTIST FOREIGN MISSION SOCIETIES ‘tte x M4 i * co RS toe SA Ss ye b} nate iaawy Panes De BOOM SIC Se, Saber dak teh OS VI ON FURLOUGH AND BACK TO WORK: MY SISTER NETTIE ness venture designed to finance my sister Nettie and myself on the field. After our business failed I had six weeks’ experience in hos- pital training, and then was busy with deputation work. Possibly deputation work is the most try- ing part of a missionary’s training. A healthy sense of humor is a helpful asset on the foreign field and just as helpful in deputation work. I think Christ sent His servants out two-by-two, knowing that two are better than one, not only because the one will lift up his fellow, but also that they might have someone with whom to laugh. Often what might appear mean or hard to a lone individual, will be an occasion for laughter when there is someone with whom to laugh. There are, for instance, such things as being met at the station by the pastor of the church in which you are to speak, and have this man of four years’ college and three years’ seminary training, greet you with the query, “ Are you the foreign mis- sionary?” What a temptation to reply, “ Yes, one of the species!” | P= of my furlough was spent in a busi- 105 106 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM Then there is the pleasure of having the one who is to introduce you to your audience, ask you, after you have gone on the platform, in what mission field you have served, and the nature of your work, then give an introduction something like this: ‘‘ We are indeed privileged today in having Miss with us. We have all read about our sister’s work in Missions and other sources, and have followed her with interest, which will be all the greater after having had her with us today, and having looked into her face and heard her tell personally about her work.” Every missionary who has done much deputa- tion work finds it difficult to refrain from smiling when, after a long, hard day of reports followed by a luncheon and pageant, then more reports, and after many have left on early trains and the rem- nant is weary, the presiding officer announces: “We have saved the best until the last’ (some- times it is, ‘saved the cream for the last’’). “ We have with us one of our dear missionaries whom we all delight to honour, and she will take these last moments (usually seven to fifteen minutes) to tell us about her work.” Securing entertainment is frequently another source of amusement. As you stand, the center of a group, Mrs. X says that she would so love to have the missionary in her home, but Mr. X is not very well. Mrs. Y would be so pleased to take you home with her, but she is having some ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 107 painting done. Mrs. Z assures you that she would not let anyone else have the privilege of entertain- ing you, but would selfishly claim it for herself, had she not two small children who make more noise than would be good for a tired speaker. Mrs. X suggests that Mrs. B be asked to take you—“ she is always willing to put people up, and has such a nice home.” Mrs. B graciously ac- cepts the guest offered her and proves a most de- lightful hostess with a family well-trained in the somewhat neglected art of true hospitality. This condition is usually limited to city churches. In rural districts one is apt to suffer from excessive entertainment, sometimes having three successive meals in the same town, with three different fam- ilies, the missionary entertaining the company in- vited for each meal, while the hostess is busy in the kitchen. Not yet has my bump of humor developed suffi- ciently to enable me to be amused or to smile when the matter of my expenses is being discussed in front of me, and two women hand me each a dollar bill, while the third fishes in her purse for two dimes and three nickels, which she hands me for “your work.” But I can greet with a grin a writ- ten request from a prominent mission worker to spend three extra days away from home (directly after two weeks of constant, hard deputation work and entertainment in thirteen strange homes) so as to fill two engagements in the same town but 108 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM four days apart, on one railroad ticket and so save the “large Young People’s division ” of a wealthy city church three dollars car-fare. I wanted to reply that I had not found anyone in California willing to do any kind of work or waiting for one dollar a day. P. W. Wilson’s The Christ We Forget, in the third chapter, under “ A Mother’s Influence,” has a pertinent paragraph that we might take to heart with profit: “ Jesus was brought up as a gentleman, considerate of others, yet able to rebuke all liberties. Simon the Phari- see might be rich, and our Lord longed to win his heart; but Simon must not forget the usual courte- sies of a host, merely because Jesus was a mis- sionary without private means.” There is the other side of deputation work, too. There are the Bethany homes into which the mis- sionary is taken as one of the family, where she finds rest and refreshment of body, enjoys spir- itual quickening and fellowship and adds to those friendships that last through the years, and enrich life with memories of happy homes. I think no missionary would wish to escape the embarrass- ments due to such lack of courtesy as has been previously noted, if such escape should entail the foregoing of the blessings found in Bethany homes. I have cited some of the embarrassments, believing that they arise, generally, from thought- lessness and hoping that to mention them may add to the Bethany type of hospitality and courtesy. ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 109 When in September, 1917, my sister Nettie and I sailed together for India, the dream of years was fulfilled, the desire of our heart gratified, and our cup of happiness full and overflowing. The years of our separation made us appreciate more per- fectly the gracious Providence that now assigned us to the same field of service. With Nettie at hand to inspire and hold me to my best, I felt able to do and endure anything that the years might bring. So I plunged into a new term of service resolved, under God, that it should be free from the mistakes that had marred my first term. The inauguration of a Language School, where our new missionaries might study the vernacular under more favourable circumstances than had heretofore been enjoyed, getting hold again of the cottages and class-room work, and training teach- ers, soon dragged me into the old rut of incessant work. Then influenza came to India, exacting a toll of 2,000,000 lives in about six months. On our school compounds fifty-three girls, teachers and servants were laid low. There was no doctor, no nurse. We bought pound bottles of bicarbonate of soda and salicylate of soda, which Nettie helped to weigh, mix and wrap the powders. None of our patients were lost and only one developed pneu- monia, although most of them ran a temperature of 104° and over. In the midst of the scourge, I noticed Nettie’s bright eyes and florid cheeks, 110 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM so took her temperature and sent her to bed with fever of 102.6°. For some time before Nettie had been troubled with a cough which the doctors at- tributed to acclimation. There was so much to be done that Nettie got up before she should have. The cough persisted and strength did not return. This was at Christmas, 1918. The following letters I wrote to my sister Bertha, in the ensuing year: Eden Bari, Mongaldai, Assam, 19th January, 1919. Dear Bertha: From “ Satribari,” you know that “ bari ”’ means garden, so you may gather from the above that I am in the Garden of Eden! It is a village of Kacharis on the north bank of the Brahmaputra River, and has been Christian for about four years. The men seem to be unusually earnest in matters of religion and of good calibre generally. The women are in comparison with their men on about a par with the Garo women as compared with Garo men. . I have just come from church. There were about eighty or one hundred present. . . . The only woman who could read was one of their girls who came with me from the boarding school... . . The men assemble quietly and sit reverently dur- ing the entire service. But in the middle of a ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 111 hymn the women come up to shake hands with me and present a couple of eggs. Throughout the service they come and go, talk to one another and scold their children, just as they please. . . . The women have had no leader or helper, and how sadly they need one. We came over here to see about buying the year’s supply of rice for the boarding school, and I came also to spy out the land, because after this year I am hoping to be able to leave school-work and do evangelistic work. So I want to see what the fields and needs are. I wish that it were the beginning of my first term rather than my second and that I had the Kachari as well as the Assamese language, and several lives to live instead of one. I don’t know yet just how a missionary could get hold of these women to help them, but there must be a way since there is such a crying need. The women and children are so poorly dressed, so untidy and filthy, so poor and aged for their years. The mother of one of my girls looks as old as an octogenarian, and yet she has a daughter only about eleven and the pastor says that she is “a very old woman, about forty- five or fifty!’ So I suppose she isn’t nearly as old as she is aged. In spite of what they lack, there is a great dii- ference between these Christian Kacharis and their non-Christian neighbours. . . . Just now they are harvesting their rice. This morning when the church bell rang and we walked to 112 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM church we passed the people from neighbouring heathen villages, some bringing in sheaves, some cutting in the fields and others driving oxen to tread out the grain. I realized then as I never had before that observing the Sabbath is hard for these poor farmers in the harvest season when every day’s labour counts for so much and no extra help is procurable. . I am staying in the preacher’s house. . . . There are some twenty people in his establishment with a dozen or so houses for his family, help, office, grain and cattle. . . . I am occupying the office. . . There is a bed of four good planks on legs, a table with a red oilcloth full of pictures. There are two good chairs and a bench in the room, be- side another bed made out of empty Singer sew- ing machine boxes. Under this bed they must have put all the rubbish from under the bed pre- pared for me, for my bed is clean underneath, but the Singer sewing machine bed looks like a rag and old clothes’ picker’s cart. . . . Just now they have brought in my morning rice in a beautiful chased bellmetal dish, water in a bright brass lota, and a brass basin in which to wash my hands. . Getting a bath has been the greatest difficulty. They watch me so all day, particularly the chil- dren, even opening the door when I have shut it, and peeping in through the bamboo windows. So last night when I knew that all the men and boys were in a meeting and the women and girls were ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 113 asleep, I went out to the little mountain stream that flows beside the house, and had a bath in my kimono just at midnight, getting so cold through to the marrow of my bones that I didn’t get warm enough to go to sleep the rest of the night. . Different villagers bring us chickens, fruit and eggs, saying that they have neither table, chair nor brass vessels in their poor homes and that they do not know how to cook curry for a European to eat, but they want to entertain us, so send these things to the preacher’s house. . Nettie’s cold is still bad. Just before we came here, I called the civil surgeon in to examine her. He found nothing wrong, but prescribed rest, cod-liver oil, a tonic and something with which to rub her chest and back. He thought she would be well in four or five days. . . . Dr. Cro- zier is going to pass through next week on his way to meet Mrs. Crozier. I’m writing him today asking him to stop over a day and give Nettie a thorough examination. . . . The phase that I do not like is a frequent rise in temperature towards evening, but some evenings she is normal, so I hope the temperature may be malaria. . 16th March, 1919. Dear Father: . . . We’ve made quite a number of acquisi- tions to our household during the last fortnight. First came a cow and her calf. The cow gives a 114 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM quart of milk a day, and sometimes less; usually less since we have had her, although the man from whom we bought her assured us that it would usually be more. We want to get a couple more cows now, so as to be supplied with sufficient milk for our babies. . . . We’ve also bought a cart and pair of oxen. But the most exciting purchase of all is a pony. . . . He’s destined for Eden Bari, the villages thereabout and for the Garo villages in our district, when I am released for evangelistic work. I paid only sixty rupees for him and five rupees to the coachman for driving the bargain. He is from Manipur, the original home of polo. . . . Up to the time we purchased him, he is sup- posed never to have been fed or watered but to have depended upon his own efforts to get food from the jungle. Neither had he been shod or clipped. He was as nervous and frightened at a bucket as he could possibly have been at a loaded motor-truck; he was shy of my hand, as suspicious of his first taste of grain and as tremblingly timid about eating from a box, as the worst country codger could be at the most elaborately laid ban- quet table in a princely banquet-hall. But he hasn’t been long getting used to the ways of civil- ization. He stood having his hair cut very well until they tried to clip under his head and about his feet. He must have thought that therein lay the source of his strength, for he did the most won- derful feats of feet, whenever they diplomati- ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 115 cally approached any of his extremities with the shears. . . . . . Nettie’s cough seems a little better. . April 5, 1919. . . . About ten days ago we had a death in the boarding department. It was Anoograu, the little baby we took from the hospital when her mother died of pneumonia. I think I wrote you that she had fits and a skin disease when we first took her. Her head was one great scab, and her hands and arms became so covered with ulcerated sores that we had to keep them in bags. And yet, she was always so good, so happy and bewitching that everybody loved her. The fits became less and less frequent. . . . She was having a hard time teething, so I took her to the Government hospital Monday and had her gums cut. She seemed better, only rather drowsy, and Wednesday morn- ing the matron called me to see the child and I found her in a state of coma. I sent for the doctor immediately and we worked over her until she came. . . . She lifted the baby from her cradle on the floor to a high bed and the heart stopped while the child was being lifted. We banked a box with beautiful blossoms very like our lilacs only with lacey leaves, and we put the little form in the mass of blossoms. She looked as though she had fallen asleep in a garden. . . . The little thing evidently had a sad heritage, so it may be 116 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM well that she slipped away as she did, but she was one of the dearest babies I have known, of any colour whatsoever. . . . It is the first baby I’ve lost; for the little tea-garden baby we had we took to bury, really, for we knew that it was dying when we received it. Just now I am keeping Birsi, the little Lakim- pur baby, in my room. She has had dysentery several times. I would keep her in my room until she seemed cured, then send her back to the dor- mitory, when the disease would develop again. As the child is only a skeleton with an enormous spleen from constant fever, I don’t dare run any risks with her. Then, too, we think she has kala- zhar, which is very contagious, so we want to safe- guard the other babies. In the bungalow she has become a new child: happy, chatty, and playful. Before she had smiles for no one and the girls thought her a dunce. When I am working at my desk or about my bedroom I keep her on a cushion in a big chair and talk mother’s nonsense with her as I have time. She talks back and gurgles with joy and excitement. Just now as I write, she is sleeping soundly on my lap. This is the part of the work that I love and for which I know I have gifts and skill, but the part for which I have to steal time from school work. . . . The missionaries are convinced that I was born to teach school. . . . I’d rather look after a half-dozen babies and sick folk and help them to live, to love ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 117 to live and to help other folk to love to live, than I would to be the most successful teacher of the largest school in India. But then, that is nothing to bother you with. Nettie’s cough is bad again. I’m begging her to go down to Calcutta next week with Mr. and Mrs. Stephen and enter a hospital where she can be under constant watch care and have someone find out just where this cough is seated and how to unseat it. . . Calcutta, Sunday (I think it’s the 5th of May), 1919. My Dear Family: I wonder if within this generation means of communication will become so perfected that sit- ting here in Calcutta I may speak with you in Washington. . . . There is much that I would like to talk about tonight—things I’d like to dis- cuss. But since discussion is out of the question, I can only ask the Great Father to give needed guidance and wisdom, believing that you, too, will be asking this same blessing for us and so through prayer we may be drawn closer together. You'll probably be surprised to see this letter dated Calcutta. Last Saturday I had a letter from Mrs. Stephen to the effect that Nettie was having a daily temperature of 101°, was losing weight, and evidently longing to get home, since she knew 118 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM that she must go. . . . I decided immediately to leave on the mail train Monday. . . . 1 am more than glad that I came since everybody seems to think that Nettie is much brighter. And I have been able to secure sailings for both of us on the Santa Cruz, a Pacific Mail steamer, due to sail from Calcutta direct to San Francisco the 20th of May. From my last letter you will know that Nettie has tuberculosis. I had hoped that it might still be incipient, but it has advanced beyond the first stage. . . . I wish we might be getting away long before the twentieth, but we are really very for- tunate to have secured passage via the Pacific even as early as this. . . . At first they could give us no berths and no hopes of securing berths, but I would not take “No” for an answer. Every time I came away from the hospital it was with the con- viction that we must get away on this steamer. When I came home from the hospital Friday night Mr. Stephen brought me a huge pile of mail and said he thought I would like to glance through them as one seemed to be from the steamer com- pany. And so it was—promising us two berths! . Nettie is down to eighty-three pounds. She has no pain but a daily temperature and is very weak. I wanted to take her for a drive and thought taking her to have her passport pictures taken was a splendid excuse for getting her away. But the Sister wouldn’t hear of her going out in “SISTER NETTIE?— On the eve of sailing for Assam ee | Fea vee eine - “i % ae At Jif PON) Meas Rae Gas” a. ae . met, oS OF rt aie yy > mT ; “) 2 eh ui * wa Son | Kl PE eats vs ws 4 7 i oc ci i wre ro, 4 7 _ ¥ 7 ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 119 a Carriage, or in fact, of her going out in any way. She said that Nettie was far too weak for such excursions. . . . I’ll be glad when she becomes my patient. The Sister is very nice to her, and so in fact everybody is,—they can’t help but be, for Nettie is such an appreciative patient, but it is a big ward and there are many to care for, so none can have all done for them that an individual nurse would do for a single patient. Since coming down here, I’ve again begged Nettie to go into a private room, but she won’t listen to it; she says she much prefers staying out on the veranda. She is brave and happy, as all who know her, would expect her to be. . . . Everybody has been unspeakably kind. I’m sure we have had a hundred letters in the last ten days or so, with loving offers of service and expressions of sympathy and encouragement. . . Recently I have been hearing of wonderful T. B. cures which have been effected out West and I am hoping that Nettie’s case will be another won- derful cure that people may soon be citing to others upon whom the dread disease has a hold. . . I am confident that Nettie is not worrying about herself at all—her mind and heart are too full of all the beautiful things with which she has been enriching them these many years. And I cannot, I will not, consider anything but a com- plete recovery for her. Too many little children need her loving motherly training, sincerity and 120 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM simplicity; and my impetuosity needs the balance of her sensible sanity. It is true, she is quite fit to be called up higher, but I believe God will let her stay yet a while longer with us, that we may share her fitness. 25th May, 1919. Dear Home-folk: You see we are really started and all promises well for Nettie. . . . The wonderful providences that have marked all our way, still attend us. . . Nettie’s nurse is engaged to one of the river pilots. He arranged for Nettie to get on board the steamer at one-thirty today, before anyone else was around and early enough to be well rested be- fore her medical exam. Then the two young Americans in the passenger office wrote the Purser, asking that Nettie be vouchsafed every possible comfort. . . . There is a very nice Stewardess on board. We have been put just opposite the ladies’ bath and near the ship’s doctor. . . . There is a nice lot of passengers on board. . . . It is good to look out and see Old Glory flying in the breeze. . . Nettie wants me to tell you how fine she is and how full of promise everything is. And just now things do seem more promising than they have for weeks. Nettie lost a pound and a half last week, but I suppose everybody in Calcutta lost this much in the heat. Do not worry about ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE i121 her. . . . The pilot will carry this back to Cal- cutta to mail... . It was too late to avert disaster. For more than a week on the voyage home we were prepared to bury Nettie at sea. But an indomitable will rallied fagging strength so that she was able, with assist- ance, to walk from the steamer to the dock when we reached San Francisco. For more than a year Nettie suffered, glorified God, and with increased power supplemented the lessons of faith and love that through the years she had been teaching her sister-friend. Her going away is one of the dark mysteries, for light upon which we must wait “ until the day- break and the shadows flee away.” In her short term of service in India, she had made herself very useful and greatly loved. Scholars and servants alike testified that her use of Assamese was more idiomatic and perfect in the ears of the Assamese, than had been acquired by any other European except Mr. Moore. This achievement is the more remarkable in view of the fact that Nettie had received no linguistic training and was thirty-one years old when she began her language work. It may be partly accounted for by the fact that her mentality was above the average and because she put hours of concentrated study upon the lan- guage. Since some others have spent more hours with not as good results, I am inclined to attribute 122 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM Nettie’s success in language work more to the fact that, conscious of her lack of training for such study, she very definitely depended upon God’s help and worked prayerfully with her books and pundits. She was peculiarly a chosen vessel of honor, sanctified and meet for the Master’s use; she seemed not to need the purging of suffering. Euro- pean and character-discerning Indian alike, were impressed with her innate goodness. One would have supposed her destined for long years of ser- vice in the place of great need to which she had been sent. Why, then, was she given but a year and a half? And why did she have to supplement this with more than a year of suffering? Since her going away I have thought much about these things. Inasmuch as with the Lord one of her days of perfect service may be as a thousand years, she may have served longer than we ken. And her suffering? “We suffer. Why we suffer,—that is hid With God's foreknowledge in the clouds of heaven.” She was content ‘to set ‘her’ soul to suffer per- fectly ” and not to question “ why.” Never once in all those months, so far as I know, did her faith falter. In no part of her life was she a greater blessing than in those last months of her suffering. Surely in some way impossible of our under- standing here and now, God must, in the taking of ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 123 such souls to Himself, be exercising the same divine love and wisdom, the same matchless economy, that all His revealed dealings proclaim. After Nettie went Home, God allowed me some training in the school of trial and perplexity. I found myself drawn into the intimacies of heart- and-home secrets of others. I battled anew with the mystery of sorrow, disappointment and trag- edy. I saw the principles of Jesus Christ applied to broken hearts and lives, result in their healing; I witnessed Christ’s precepts of love and forgive- ness speak peace to domestic storms and repair the havoc of home tragedies; I watched men and women who had suffered the loss of that which in the secret, sacred places of the heart they most cherished, come up from the valley of the shadows of sorrow with peace marked on the battle-ground of their faces, as they went forth forgetting self in serving others. Pain and sorrow are still mys- teries, but I know that Christ sheds a light upon them that brings strength out of struggle, and peace out of storm. I know, also, that this light in the darkness, has come and can come from no other source than Christ. It was then that I saw the mud walls of Indian huts crumble away and within I saw my brown friends without God and without hope in the world, blind and in Christless darkness, grope for light as they, too, lifted empty arms while the hungry heart cried, ‘‘ Where? ” and the weary mind asked 124 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM “Why?” Mocked by disappointed hopes, and tragic denials, I saw other brown friends question why it had to be and ask how they could go on after defeat. So with a more sympathetic com- passion for India’s unshepherded sheep and a more understanding love, I sailed the third time for Assam, to help Christ “ give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death, to guide their feet into the way of peace.” Vil CARRYING ON trip out into the district, forty to sixty miles from Gauhati, where our Christian villages are hidden in bamboo clumps beside rivers. All the three days’ journey back from the jungle to the station, I was building a little “ house by the side of the road’ somewhere in the district near a bazaar center, planting gardens around it and peopling it with throngs of sick brown people com- ing for medicines, ignorant ones coming for books and learning, mothers coming with babies to learn how best to nourish and care for them, and sin- ning, sorrowing men and women coming to find the Saviour. All the years I spent in school-work were hounded by the vision of this house by the side of the road, and every trip to the jungle afforded new details for the dream house and the work to be done by it. Friends and different organizations in my home church gave me a purse of five hundred dollars be- fore I returned to Assam, and this helped interpret the dream into reality. While seeking out a loca- tion for the camp-house, I did evangelistic work in and around Gauhati, and helped put into shape 125 I was in February, 1914, that I had my first 126 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM the second year’s course of language study for new missionaries. In February, I attended the Kam- rup Garo Christian Association and wrote the fol- lowing letters to my Mother and the folks at home: Gauhati, Assam, India, Feb., 1922. Dear Mother-mine: . I want to warn you not to be concerned if you do not get mail from me very regularly these next few months. Sometimes I will not be within reach of a post-office when the weekly mail goes out. Sometimes I'll be on the north bank, and sometimes up in the hills on this side of the river. . . . Neither be worried because of any- thing you may chance to see in the papers. Things have been somewhat disturbed around Assam, but we all believe that the situation is much better than it was and are confident that the British Government can handle it. In accordance with Gandhi’s gospel of non-codperation, the people hereabouts refused to pay taxes and looted carts, ostensibly to confiscate and destroy any foreign goods they might be conveying. So the Govern- ment had to send an officer with several hundred sepoys to collect taxes. The soldiers are stationed at Boko, the people are paying their taxes and “‘swaraj”’ seems as unattainable today as it was several years ago when Gandhi inaugurated his crusade and slogan. . CARRYING ON 127 Personally, I feel perfectly safe and wondrously happy—happy as I imagine birds are when on the wing. I am positive that I am in God’s place for me and am expecting His blessing on the work out here in the district. Let me tell you of an experience of His wonderful answer to prayer. Thursday I walked ten miles with the girls in the hottest part of the day on a dusty, shadeless road. Then the motor car that had carried the rest on, came back and picked us up for the next twenty- five miles or so. It had engine trouble, so we were delayed. It was dusk when we reached the end of the road where we had to leave the motor and walk the last five miles through a jungle. This jungle is a forest reserve and is so dense that it is dusk even in daylight. So it was very dark shortly after we entered it. There was a good moon that pierced the dark with darts of light. Much of the way a mountain stream was the only path, so there was nothing to do but take off shoes and stockings and splash in the water. It was gratefully cold to our tired feet, but oh, the stones and pebbles! The girls didn’t mind them at all for they are always barefooted and the soles of their feet are like leather. After about a mile of this sort of travel, we came out upon an open space and after a bit were fronted with two paths. The two girls who were most familiar with that section decided that the upper path was the right one. We followed it some distance when again we 128 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM were confronted with two paths. By this time the girls admitted that they didn’t know the way. It was about seven-thirty. We had been on the road twelve hours and had eaten nothing since early morning. So the girls were beginning to get panicky,—and no wonder, for they knew that about three weeks before, while burning the jungle just a mile or two away, two men had been killed by a tiger. Then we remembered “‘ from whence cometh our help,” so knelt there on the hill and asked God to direct our path. While we were yet rising from our knees the sharp report of a gun came along the direction of the lower path. We knew that the gun had been shot in the village for which we were bound, for every evening of the Association they give this sign when about to close the Asso- ciation storehouse. So does God hear and answer prayer. Singing “He Leadeth Me,” and ‘“ What a Wonderful Saviour,” we retraced our steps and were soon in camp. With such a God to care for us, surely we have no need to fear one for the other. . On the north bank of the Brahmaputra River was a new Christian community of Kacharis, num- bering nearly one thousand. The women had be- come Christians because the men of their house- hold had adopted the new faith, but they had only a negative knowledge of the religion they pro- CARRYING ON 129 fessed. They knew that Christians are supposed not to beat their wives and are not allowed more than one wife; they are not allowed to worship idols; they must not make or drink beer, toddy, or other intoxicants, and are not permitted to work or to buy and sell on Sunday. Around their nega- tive concept of Christianity had gradually grown up ideas of schools and books, church and hym- nals, more clothing (particularly shoes), and the substitution of repeated awkward handshakes for their own graceful salaam, as a greeting. None of the mothers could read or write, and knew little or nothing of the doctrine they were supposed to adorn. During the five years that their own field- missionary had been in America, this great group of earnest, ignorant young Christians had but one or two brief visits annually from a missionary from another field and no work had been undertaken for the women. In the midst of this community there was a vil- lage that in its non-Christian state had been known as “ Gahorigaon,” or “ The Village of Swine,” be- cause of the numbers of hogs that wallowed in mire around most of the mud houses. After becoming Christians, the men of Gahorigaon wanted a new name for their village. They went to their Bibles and read about a garden that the Lord God planted, where grew every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, and a river went out to water the garden. It seemed a description of 130 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM their own village minus the hogs, so they did away with the swine, built a church for the tree of life and a school for the tree of knowledge, and called their village “‘ Edenbari,”—“ bari ” meaning garden. After I had planned to build my house by the side of the road in this Garden of Eden, word was received that the missionary who had previously worked the field was returning shortly, but with- out his wife, who was staying in the States with their little girl. So it would have been unwise for a single woman to live in the same community, hence the house had to be located on the south bank of the Brahmaputra River. After several other sites had been selected and for one and an- other reason had to be given up, upon the advice of a government official the house by the side of the road was finally located at Hahim Depot, at the foot of the Khasi Hills. On the Train Going to Jorhat, Feb. 18, 1922. Where shall I begin? There is so much to write that the end will not be for some pages. . . . That was a happy, happy week incamp. I walked about fifty-five miles and some of it in the heat of the day, and seem none the worse for the exercise, so you may know that I am in excellent physical trim. The Association closed Sunday night. . . . After. we reached the second rest-house, coming back to CARRYING ON 131 Gauhati, Isabella* and I went out to speak to some children and distribute picture-cards amongst them. As usual out in the district, the children were afraid to receive them at first but after one ven- turesome spirit dared to take the card into her hand, little ones sprang up from hedges, houses and ditches, and mothers came asking for cards for absent children. We went to bed early, setting the alarm for twenty minutes of four and leaving tea in the thermos bottles for a bit of breakfast before ‘starting out in the morning. We slept together on a wee single bed, so as to use some of our blankets for a mattress over the metal springs. The next ‘morning we . . . started from the rest-house at a quarter of five—the moonlight very bright and the morning stars shining as brightly as the nearly full moon would let them. Rhonji had to stay back with the baggage to wait for the ox-cart that was to come out from Gauhati. . . . So I slung a ‘thermos bottle of malted milk across one shoulder and carried my topi-strap slung on the other arm with the topi hanging down and making a pocket for my revolver which had all six chambers loaded in case we should meet with something along the road. The air was fresh and chilly. We had twelve miles to walk before quarter of nine, in order to catch the public motor car that runs from Palishbari to Gauhati. At first it was difficult to read the numbers on the mile stones, but after * Miss Wilson, my Gauhati colleague. 132 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM dawn we found that we did three miles an hour steadily. . . The morning we got into Gauhati, Mr. Stephen called to say that the Jungakoli bungalow which we hoped to buy from the Forest Department for my camp-house, is not for sale now. I felt he must have made a mistake for the place seems so ideal for our purpose that I thought it had to be mine. When I recovered from the shock of sur- prise, I clung desperately to the faith that God had something better in store, although I couldn’t see what could be better. When the Forest Officer heard that I wanted one room for medicines and sick folks, he told Mr. Stephen to bring me along to have a talk with him. We went that afternoon and he said that if my little house was to be part hospital or dispensary, he was quite sure he could get me a grant of land and timber! Of course the words “hospital and dispensary” took my breath away and I hastened to explain that I was not qualified to run a hospital or dispensary but planned to stock simple remedies for fever, dysen- tery, running sores, sore eyes, etc., and to have two cots for some sick women or children that might be in need of a little careful nursing. I was told, however, that the experience I have had with the school children has probably qualified me bet- ter than I think. It seems the Government wants to establish little dispensaries around through the isolated villages, but cannot afford to do so. They } CARRYING ON 133 particularly want me to give Kalazhar treatments. This is a wasting fever very much like T. B. It has decimated whole sections of Assam and caused the people to abandon numbers of villages. The theory is that the germ is carried by bedbugs. The disease is being successfully treated by venous injections. . . . It is saving many lives. I plan to have Scripture texts painted on the dispensary walls and pictures of Christ as the great Physician and Comforter. We'll have a little Gos- pel talk and hymn every day. The Tuttles think it a wonderful opportunity and so do the others. . . When I went to advise with Mr. and Mrs. Tuttle, they gave me the wonderful news that a cable had just come from home, “ Five hundred dollars gold for Holmes at present rate of ex- change.” I’m sure that you sent it. So wonder- fully, wonderfully, does God time His provisions according to our need. . . . Who but God could have done this? For a lack of additional funds for the house seemed to be the chief drawback to this new plan, but I told Ethel that if we really needed more money, God would send it down from above or in from around, or up from below, but it would be here when needed. And here it is! And here I raise another Ebenezer! You can imagine with what joy and gratitude and reverence I went back into the district with Augusta the next day to spy out the land. It is beautifully situated, of which more later. Two Christian households have set- 134 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM tled in the village. The wife in one house is one of our old girls, Mohini. There are a considerable number of Nepalese in the village, and within a few miles there are dozens of villages of Garos, Rabhas, Kacharis, etc., who have never heard the Gospel. And there are populous Assamese villages within easy reach by motor, where Christ has never been lifted up. So the place seems a good working base. March 19, 1922. Dear Home-folk: I took twelve exposures of a Premo pack to help you visualize in what a very pleasant place the lines are fallen unto me and amongst what an in- teresting lot of folks I am to live. And here the whole pack of films melted! So I’ll have to do the best I can with some word sketches. Hahim is beautifully situated. The morning sun creeps up over low wooded hills and drops at night between two ranges of higher hills. I call these western hills my letter-box, because in the evening Sol is a postman charged with loving mes- sages for you at home. The western hills are beautiful with great clumps of bamboos like friends waving plumed hats in greeting. At night the Lit- tle Bear dips his tail into the valley between two ranges and the southern stars saddle higher hills closer. From these southern hills a mountain stream of considerable force winds a serpentine course CARRYING ON 135 around the west and is lost in the valley where the tail of the Little Bear dips low. The evening skies are very beautiful here just now at the end of the long dry season. My neighbours have grouped these stars in an order handed down from long generations of forefathers who spent many nights every harvest in their little shelters in tree tops, keeping watch with the stars over their crops and guarding them from the ravages of wild beasts. The other night I pointed out different constella- tions and most of the boys and girls seemed familiar with their Garo names and the Garo fables behind the names. After the long, dry season everything is parched and brittle. The ground rustles with fallen leaves, the fields and hillsides are brown with parched growth and black with the cinders of burnt jungle. The river has shrivelled into a harmless stream, scarcely waist-deep, with wide stretches of rocks and sand on its naked beaches. It is about two o’clock as I write, and the third week in March, but the heat is the heat of midsummer. Our little pup is panting in the shade on the cool, mud floor by the open door; the chickens are standing in the shade with open mouths, gasping for breath. I doubt if even a “ big, fat, woolly one ” would tempt them to run even a short distance in this sun. They have been burning jungle all about us; the air is heavy with smoke; bits of burned leaf are falling everywhere; we can hear the sharp report 136 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM of bursting bamboo and occasionally the roar of consuming fire. In another three months the pic- ture will be quite different. Then the earth will be clothed in soft, rich greens and the rocks and sand of the riverside will be buried in a strong, swift current that will flood the lowlands, sing the song of rushing waters night and day, and raise a gulf between the peoples on its two banks. . . I often change my mind about the most fascinat- ing children, because so many are fascinating. I have almost decided definitely, however, that Nepali children are the cream of winsomeness. They are so spontaneous, have the sweetest piping baby voices, and the longest, most grown-up style of clothes. I took the picture of a little Nepali boy and girl for you. These little ones are not Chris- tians, but were at Sunday school last Sunday and we became friends. The next day when I hunted them down for their pictures the mother of the little girl yanked her away and insisted upon dress- ing her proudly in all her best things and in some of the mother’s best things, too. Little girls wear shawls over their heads, little basque waists, and skirts that just escape the ground. So they look for all the world like little old women or as though they were playing dress-up. This girlie had a green-and-red silk shawl, a red-and-pink basque with a big necklace of silver coins outside it, and a voluminous skirt of yellow flowers on a brown background. She had bangles and anklets and ear- CARRYING ON 137 rings and a nose-ring. The little boy wore flow- ing trousers down to his ankles and over it a white shirt with a long, long tail hanging outside. Add round baby faces with large brown eyes, heavy black lashes, skin of soft tan, chubby baby hands and feet, and even then you won’t begin to have an idea how fetching the youngsters are until you have fallen under the spell of their baby voices. These Nepalese used to work in a corundum mine twenty miles back in the hills, but the mine has been abandoned. Now the men gamble with cards all day and most of the night, except when they are quarrelling over the cards. Some of the women keep little shops, for this is a big market center. . . . People come from twenty miles back in the hills to buy and sell here. They begin to arrive Sunday at sunset. The Khasas with their goods carried in a basket-chair peculiar to their tribe; the women usually very heavily dressed, the men often wearing just a loin curtain. Garos come with their wares in another kind of basket. Amongst non-Christian Garos, men and women both are generally scantily clad. . . . And there are the Nepalese with yards and yards of cloth in the women’s skirts and the men with pajamas to the ankles. They camp in the open fields and on the banks of the river, always with a fire... . Monday morning the bazaar opens under little thatch roofs beneath which the people sit on the ground with their wares around them—betel-nuts, 138 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM rice, potatoes, onions, fish, salt, spices, candy, oil,. notions, cloth, soap, pottery and cattle. Most of the small produce is arranged in little pice piles. A pice is half-a-cent. All day the crowd changes. Some stay for the two days; some sell their goods and return home Monday. New people arrive Monday afternoon and the bazaar sits again Tues- day until afternoon. ‘These two days are our harvest days. We play the graphophone and use the magic lantern. Sometimes we have an audi- ence of several hundred out under the stars. They are very fond of the laughing songs and of the American Indian songs with drums. We always close with a hymn; very often it is, “ Joy to the World” or “ Nearer My God, to Thee.” Then we tell them the old story of Jesus having come to save us from our sins and crown our lives with peace and joy. Already we have had a number of calls to care for ulcers and sores, and oh, the babies and chil- dren that are burning with fever and have skeleton bodies and huge spleens! So many, many women say, “‘ This is the only child I have left; the others have died of fever.”” And other women of wistful face say, “‘ I had sons and daughters, but they all died.” Some of the men told me that they consider themselves very fortunate if they are able to raise half of their children to reach their teens. I know that there are many, many needs that I will not be able to meet, but I know, too, that there are many CARRYING ON 1389 ways in which I can help save babies for their mothers and some souls for their Saviour. Since you know how I love nursing you will not wonder that I am glad to be here. . “ Nengtakram,” the Garo name for my home, means ‘ Rest-Haven.” That is what I want it to become for many weary ones. Pray that God‘may bless my contact with these people to His glory and their salvation. . For two months I lived in a wee shack without windows, but with a foot or two of open space be- tween the four or five feet high walls and the low roof of rotten thatch, finished with ancient cob- webs and slits through which sunshine percolated and stars winked. The hut had once been used as a cook-shed and the smoke of many fires had bur- nished the bamboo of the frame-work into rich shades of copper and brown. Nengiakram, Hahim Depot, Boko Post Office, Kamrup District, Assam, India. March 12, 1922. Dear Jack: Haven’t I an aspiring address? If you could see the house I am occupying you would see the 140 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM necessity for an elaborate identification. It is in the village where I hope to have my bungalow, but for the present I am occupying a shelter that was used first as a storeroom and later as a chicken-house. The rats shared it when it was used as a granary, leaving tunnels in the dirt floor. These we have filled in and smeared with mud, so it is nice as a carpet except that it is still wet. The chickens resent our taking possession. We just moved in yesterday afternoon and one old hen insisted upon coming to her old haunt to lay an egg and all the chickens were determined to roost here. When we wouldn’t let them in through the door, one by one, they tried to “climb up some other way.” And they succeeded, too, for it is no feat for them to fly over four feet of reed wall through the two feet of open space above... . You would have enjoyed being in camp with us last week on the north side of the Brahmaputra, for the place is a net-work of mountain streams and fishing is good. The people fish so much with so many different kinds of apparati, that one won- ders that any fish are left. . . . You will be inter- ested in the crudest, least sportsman-like method of fishing that I saw yesterday. . . . We walked to a village about a mile from here and were told that all the men were fishing, so went down to the river. They call this particular form of fishing, “gun fishing.” They prepare an explosive, using sulphur mostly, I believe. They bind it in bark OX-CART AND DRIVER r* <0 geil sette . , ee ie ‘ y ia eeu a tah) aioe a “4 ee E - + a ~~ > or Se a3 e a SERIE LS Fre . oY 2 gt he fs ec ENG: : > 7 - _ wi > ei te A prot ey CO ee ee - y ee ee : WA? Bet ee : ‘ an 2 eet. « el, ) one # wr s - a a ivy - S i il) a ? 4 vUNA Be ee fe AA « Adit a