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By the Reverend A. H. Mellen

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T was a small river on the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec in southern Mexico.
A long canoe just like Robinson

Crusoe's, cut from a log, was moving away from the steep, grass-covered bank. There was a little canopy over the canoe large enough to protect one passenger from sun and rain. The plantation doctor had come to say farewell, and just as the missionary peeped over the little roof, the doctor's camera opened its eye for a look, and the result is that your eyes are looking at the very same scene on this page.

That was at ten o'clock in the morning, and all day long the barefooted Indian boys pushed on against the swift current of the river. Going to the bow they would let the long poles slip through their

hands until the bottom was found, give one strong, twisting push as they faced about, and then, leaning heavily against the poles, would trot half the length of the boat, returning quickly to the bow again, while the steersman kept them in the shallow water near the shore. We stopped for lunch at a great tree which the river had laid low; the water was running all around it, but another tree with its roots still firm shaded the fallen trunk as if to extend a personal welcome.

It was a long, tiresome journey, and the missionary had time to reflect. This was his second trip on the river. He was the first clergyman who had ever visited the plantation, and they had given him a royal welcome. The manager had furnished a mount and taken him for a ride; and what a ride that was! Through the woods and out into the clearing, where the forest had fallen before money-making industry. There were logs and stumps in every direction; smoke here and there curled lazily up as if the fire did not care to be a partner in making away with the tall palms and stately seiba trees with orchids hanging on their limbs. There were many dark natives in the picture swinging the axe with skill and power, while a peculiar interest came from many pairs of slowmoving oxen on the hillside yoked in Spanish fashion with the yoke bound fast to the hams. The estate covered 5,000 acres, and there were also immense stretches of thrifty sugar cane. looks from a distance a little like tall corn, though of a somewhat lighter shade of green, and without the tassels. A work of cultivation was going on requiring men and mules in considerable numbers, and a Scotchman was acting as overseer. From long exposure in the tropics he was nearly as dark as one of the Indians, but of giant build, and apparently reserved and quiet. Like so

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many men in these countries, seemed somewhat hardened and estranged from religious influences.

Of all these things the missionary thought on the slow river trip. Was he accomplishing anything? Did it pay? Well, at any rate, whether it paid or not, he had agreed to go to the plantation every month. He went on to an oil refinery for the following Sunday, and thence to meet appointments at the ports, one on the Pacific and the other on the Gulf. There is plenty of live interest there where the railway meets the sea. A row of long-armed electric cranes revolve high above the wharves; trains come directly under them; and with great storehouses on one side and ships on the other, they carefully transfer all manner of merchandise in either direction. The missionary was two days ahead of his Sunday appointment at the port and was making use of this opportunity to meet and know all the people. Who is this man at the hotel table? The missionary knew there must be, somewhere in his brain cells, a name to match that face, yet, as so often happens,

the name did not float to the surface, but some drifting memory did appear, and he knew it was the big Scotch fieldforeman from the sugar plantation. He reached over and shook hands, and learned that the man had left his position and was waiting for a steamer to go to the Hawaiian Islands.

That evening the two men took a walk together, and at the end of it the Scotchman said, very quietly, "I've been out from home some years; it's a long while since I've been to church, and I can never tell you how much it meant to me the two times when you came away down the river to see us; it took me right back to my childhood and my home, and the second time seemed far better than the first."

The missionary felt penitent for having permitted the question of profits to enter his mind even for a moment, and further thought: If it means so much to revive the memory of a Christian home, and so much more to send the light of divine love into dark, un-Christian homes, then nothing on earth pays like missions.

AMONG THE SAND HILLS OF NEBRASKA

By the Right Reverend Anson R. Graves, D.D.,
Bishop of Kearney

N the northern part of the Missionary District of Kearney is a large district known as the "sand hill country." It is about 200 miles in length from east to west and about 100 miles north and south. It is a succession of hills, some of them 400 feet in height, most of them much less. Between these hills running in every direction are low valleys. In some of these valleys are shallow lakes. In these valleys the wild grass is cut for hay. The hills are green about four months of the year, and are reddish brown the rest of the time. Everywhere through this sand hill country are ranchmen who keep large herds of cattle or horses. The ranch houses are from five to eight miles apart. There are several branches of railroads running into the edge of this country which carry the cattle to market in the fall. One railroad, the Burlington, runs through the middle of this country, the whole length from east to west. Along this railroad, about every twenty-five miles is a little hamlet with from fifty to a hundred people. There are generally two or three large stores in these hamlets which supply the ranchmen for forty miles each side of the railroad. In some of these hamlets there is a Methodist chapel with occasional services, and in others there are rarely any religious services.

It has always been a serious problem how to reach these ranching people with the services of the Church. In one case I had a sod chapel built forty miles from the railroad, where we tried to hold services once a month. It proved a blessing to the people in that neighborhood for a number of years, but some of the missionaries objected to driving so far, especially in cold weather.

Last winter I heard of a man who had been a clergyman living on a ranch a

few miles from Mullen in the very centre
of this sand hill country. The people
at Mullen had asked him to give them
services and bury their dead. He wrote
to me for a lay-reader's license, which I
gladly gave him, with permission to ex-
hort. He went to work in Mullen, and.
in the country school-houses for thirty
miles around. I was anxious to go there
in the spring, but I had already made my
appointments to that part of the district.
I found, however, that by coming back
a hundred miles from Alliance I
could give them two days. On my ar-
rival I was immediately taken to a
private house, where I baptized six
adults and one child. The next day I
made calls with the lay-reader, baptized
two adults and one child, held a business
meeting with the men and a reception
in the afternoon, organized the mission.
by appointing officers and held service in
the evening in a public hall. Of the
ninety-five inhabitants of the village,
seventy-five were in the hall. I preached,
and confirmed twenty-five adults, al-
though this was the first time I had ever
visited the place. Some of those con-
firmed came over thirty miles. The next
morning in the same hall I gave an ex-
tended instruction on the Holy Com-
munion and administered it to twenty-
eight persons. The day before that there
were only four communicants within
forty miles of the place. About half the
people of the village were at the station
to bid me Godspeed that morning and
the same evening I preached in Craw-
ford, 150 miles away.

All this shows what a ripe harvest there is for the Church in all the country places of the West, if we can only find the right kind of men to push the work. A thousand such men as this lay-reader could be put to work in such

neglected places of the West, and yet the Church requires that men, before they are permitted to minister to these scattered sheep, must be college and seminary graduates, versed in at least three dead languages and the philosophies of all the ages! When will this Church of ours awake to the great mission that lies be

fore her, adapt herself to the conditions of to-day and use the means necessary to reach the masses of this great country? While we are priding ourselves on our apostolic and educated ministry we are withholding the Gospel from millions of simple people who are hungry for the Word.

NEWS AND NOTES

A Texas clergyman sends this message to the
Church Missions House:

AITH is justified of her children, also. I applauded the fine faith of the Board of Missions when it resolved to wrest a victory from defeat, and bade the Church go forward in apostolic fashion despite the handwriting on the walls of her counting-house, but I did not do so loud enough to be heard in New York. I have just read The Churchman of September 28th, and I feel that I must send you a line to let you know how very glad I was and am that the Board sounded a charge when the figures called so pathetically for a retreat. I am enclosing $5 to help wipe out the old deficit. "We are fools for Christ's sake" is a motto that our Church might march under to many a victory in these coming years.

How to develop a

་།

the Church's work is one of the tasks to which the wise missionary leader always addresses himself. Bishop Graves, of Shanghai, writes:

R

sources very considerably. At this annual dinner we talk over with the committee the needs and prospects of the hospital, and lay out the work for the coming year. It is one of the ways in which we are more and more enlisting the services of the Chinese in support of the work of the mission.

T

Writing of a trip into the mountain country of eastern Cuba, the Rev. C. B. Ackley, of Guantanamo, says:

WE

E took the train toward the mountains as far as the railroad goes, about six miles through the cane fields. Then we rode on horseback up into the mountains over twelve miles of the wildest, roughest trails I ever saw. We passed through little hamlets where everything in the whole settlement has been brought up on pack-mules—even the American beer! . . . I sense of responsibility for suppose there have not been services in these mountain hamlets in years, and I look forward to the time when I can speak enough Spanish to go to such towns and tell them the wonderful message. Finally, after two and a half hours, we reached the coffee estate called "Bella Vista," and it is well named. The great broad valley of Guantanamo lay like a map before our eyes. At our feet in the broad terraces were the browning ovens for the chocolate beans; these terraces have cemented floors and low stone sides; the cocoa beans are spread out there to

ECENTLY I attended the annual dinner to the Chinese committee, whose business is to arouse interest and collect funds for St. Luke's Hospital. The committee consists of ten members, five of whom are our own Christians and the other five non-Christian Chinese. Since its formation, somewhat more than a year ago, the committee has done excellent work and has increased the income of the hospital from Chinese

notes:

OR about three years the young men

FOR

brown in the sun. Below these terraces The Bishop of Mississippi sends the following were slopes of orange trees and lemons; some of the lemons actually measure eleven inches around, and sour-why one of these would make lemonade for a whole Sunday-school picnic. Still further down the slopes and off on the surrounding mountain sides were the most glorious groves of royal palms; in the distance were the fields of waving green cane tops, and off on the horizon the mountain peaks which surround this valley on all sides, making it a little world to itself.

The Rev. Dudley Tyng, passing through Shanghai on his way to the District of Hankow, had an opportunity of seeing something of St. Luke's Hospital. In commenting upon the many demands made upon Dr. August W. Tucker, who was caring for the work single-handed at the time, Mr. Tyng says:

“IF

F I remember aright, he was called out from three successive meals to look after a woman who had been hit over the head with a gun by a white man, to attend a coolie who had been jammed between two river boats, and to try to do something for a baby with lockjaw. At Shanghai also I saw the fine compound at Jessfield. Mann Hall was nearing completion. This will enable St. John's to take in 500 students."

From Shanghai Mr. Tyng steamed up the Yangtse, "for three nights and two days of the fierce humid heat of Central China to Kiukiang, thence ten miles up hill to the summer resort of Kuling. I did not need to be very long on the plain or in Kuling to appreciate the need and benefit of the latter. Here for a few weeks, and not many at that, the missionary is able to get away from the exhausting summer nights and days of the lowlands and to get up new energy in the hills. Not that the scanty weeks are all given to play. Conventions, conferences and committee meetings have kept some people, at least, on the rush all summer. Kuling is the salvation of a good many hundred missionaries."

of Christ Church Chapter of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, Vicksburg, Miss., under the direction of the Rev. C. W. Hinton, have been conducting the mission work of that parish. A substantial evidence of their zeal and success was afforded a few Sundays since. The rector's illness and enforced absence during more than twelve months has left the parish at the kind mercy of the bishop and his staff of clergy for ministrations. Trinity Sunday was the day for rallying the unbaptized children, and from far and near, on that oppressively hot day, parents brought their children in such conveyances as could be hadand in many cases on foot-to Christ Church, where the bishop baptized twenty-four at one time.

In a missionary diocese, the bishop must "do the work of an evangelist." Doubtless he should always be an evangelist, but he must be in such a diocese as Mississippi. Some weeks ago, the bishop was asked to come to a Mississippi River landing, and, many miles from any church, to baptize a child. An appointment was made, and before the day arrived the one communicant in the place had thoroughly prepared for the bishop's visit. To his gratified astonishment, there were four to be baptized, and seven to be confirmed, gathered from the scattered community which rarely ever saw a clergyman of any kind.

A notable two years' work of one of the busiest missionaries, the Rev. J. L. Sykes, of West Point, Miss., may be encouraging to those who are looking for returns. He has built two brick churches, one without any debt, bought two lots, and almost exactly doubled the communicants in his field. He serves five missions, and the Agricultural and Mechanical College of the State. When he took charge, there was only one church building in the field-at West Point. He has renovated this building, and has a neat little "rectory nest-egg" of several hundred dollars.

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