in the compounds in the heart of the city, gave us good cheer and goodly fellowship for the next two days.

Two letters and a wire awaited me, all from Mrs. Dodd, and the wire announced her safe arrival in Canton. Three letters and a wire, all within a space of three days! What a contrast to the previous three months!

Brother Hughes, of the C. and M. A., as the Alliance is known. for short, piloted me about, giving me much good fellowship to boot. First of all we called upon Mr. Von Bruen, of the customs service, to whom Mr. Klatt of Mengtzu had given me a letter of introduction. This good German gentleman and his wife and daughter made us feel well repaid for the discharge of this social obligation. We had a delightful tea and an equally delightful insight into this typical German home of the best sort.

But naturally the most of our time was given to calling upon the members of the three missions which have headquarters in Wu Chow, the C. and M. A., the Southern Baptists, and the English Wesleyans. Of these three, the Baptists and Wesleyans have the larger headquarters in Canton and Hong Kong, from which they draw supplies of trained workers. But the training plant of the Alliance people for their work in this whole region centers in Wa Chow. Hence their educational work is exceptionally strong here.

All work of all three missions is carried on in the Chinese language. And within the past few years the ingathering has been great. The change of attitude toward Christianity within this province of late years the missionaries regard as little short of marvelous. It was once so very strongly anti-foreign that Dr. Fulton of our Mission in Canton had his workers stoned out of the province. But the missionaries now say that it is no loss of face" for a man to attend Christian services, and hundreds do so. Both the Alliance and the Baptist people have their large churches in the heart of the city. I recall being told that the Alliance church will seat seven or eight hundred people comfortably in the main audience room. And the missionaries tell me that of late both these large audience rooms are well filled on Sundays, mostly by heathen men. A man no longer "loscs face" by going the full length and becoming a Christian. As regards the Chinese the province is

very ripe; some one has said that the missions need not so much sowers as reapers.

But there is as yet no Protestant work for the Chawng-jen, or Chawng people, as the Tai are locally called, carried on in their own language. A few of them have gathered into the Chinese churches and one of the most valued mission helpers is a Chawng man. I had the opportunity to confer on this point with the Alliance people, whose guest I was. I gathered that they had so felt the need and call for separate work for the "aborigines" that they had been contemplating organizing for that purpose. But they also seemed to feel that the visits of Mr. Freeman and myself to them had shown them, as they had Dr. Clift at Nan-ning fu, that our Tai Mission already has the organi zation and the plant for this purpose. They professed their readiness to coöperate in the most fraternal way with us if we should be led to extend our Tai work into this region, we working the Chawng (Tai) and they being especially led, I gathered, toward opening much needed work among the eighteen million Annamese.

It is a matter of serious regret that I did not have time for independent investigations among the Chawng people. I was already behind my schedule time, my wife and daughter were awaiting me in Canton, after a separation of nearly half a year. But the regret is tempered by the investigations among this tribe which Mr. Freeman has already so patiently and thoroughly made. At least the chief element in the present-day Chawng as well as T'o immigrated from An-hui and Chieng-si and Hu-nin after a two-thousand five-hundred-year struggle with the Chinese in that eastern ancestral home of the Ai-Lao race. And they again suffered defeat at the hands of the. Chinese in their newer home south of the Yangtze, in 1053, A.D. The feud between them and the Chinese is milleniums long. Everywhere I have had the opportunity to investigate in China the modern Tai, by whatever local name he is known, and whether coming from the ruins and remains of the Ta-li-Kingdom, and whether smarting from the Canton and West River defeat, he refuses Chinese culture just as long as he can stand out against it. The Chinese despise the "aborigines," and the latter hate the invaders. There is a clear call for separate work for each race, until such time as the love of Christ shall melt and dis

solve these racial feuds, and fuse Chinese and Tai alike into the body politic of the peaceful Kingdom of the Branch.

On the morning of Wednesday, June 22, we left the kind friends in Wu Chow, and took the steamer "Sainam" for Canton. Mrs. Hess kindly put up a lunch basket, as the charges for meals are high on the steamer; thus following up the departing guest with her kindness. I had Ai Fů cook for me until the last. What a dear, good fellow he had been all the way! It touched me very much when it came his turn to lead in the morning and evening devotions to hear him refer to us petitioners as "we two servants of God." For a long time there were only two of us; soon the family would be reunited. He was nearly as much excited over the prospect as I was.

We arrived the next morning about seven o'clock, June 23, three days late by the schedule fixed in Mengtzu on May 16apparently welcome, notwithstanding. Our family had been separated five months and a half, and could afford to overlook a little matter of tardiness with a good excuse backing it. It goes without saying that we were well entertained by the various missionaries during our stay in Canton. Our family were guests of Dr. Mary Niles in the School for Blind Girls. This gave us exceptional opportunity to come into contact with this Christlike work and that of the Refuge for the Insane so near it, this latter being under the direction of Mrs. Kerr. Ai Fu was accommodated at the Theological Seminary. Arrangements were made for our family to pursue its way to America on furlough, and for Ai Fu to return to his family in Chiengrai, via Hong Kong and Bangkok. He finally reached them safely, a much traveled man.