Trees, Tibetans, and the Telegraph 127
the medicine brought back the little one's fleeting life. Such a brain and such a heart find God in the quinine and give Him such name as may please the sahib.
I think it would be a destructively pathetic experience for the missionaries were it not that the gentle hand of daily custom leads us around the sharp flints of disappointed emotion. The missionary becomes attached in human ways to the human lives around him, and the fierce letter of denunciation against the unbeliever is unbelieved. The simple, helpful days at the mission slip quietly into years. Jesus will convert the heathen in His own good time ; meanwhile faith, and, above all, interest in the new wing of the dispensary, in the new baby of last year's sole convert, in the water-on-the-knee case reported yesterday, in the folklore that is being slowly transformed into literature, in the last white man who flitted through the station, in the papers from home with their strange talk of wild excitement on the Bourse, in the letters from home with their talk of mother and sister and cousin—even this growing now a little strange to the tranquil hearts in the mission. Such lives have I seen in Abyssinia, in Alaska, in Egypt, in Turkey, in Turkestan, in Kashmir, in India. 'T is true my passing glance could not read all that time had writ on the exiled faces. Sometimes disease had drawn its furrow across the once placid brow ; sometimes the eyes still mourned a dead love or a dead ambition. But generally, carried on the smooth tide of occupation in medical and school work, the mission life passes the measured hours with such
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