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0099 The heart of a continent : vol.1
The heart of a continent : vol.1 / Page 99 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000247
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edifice near Peking. It is about twenty feet high, made of
mud, crumbling to pieces, and with large gaps. At intervals
of from half a mile to a mile there are mud-built towers."

At Kalgan I found a little missionary colony of Americans,
among whom Mr. Sprague was most kind in giving me assist-
ance and trying to obtain information about this route across
the desert from Kwei-hwa-cheng which I would have to follow.
Besides Mr. Sprague, there was Mr. Williams and two lady
doctor missionaries, Miss Diament and Miss Murdock, who
seemed to me to do much good. A medical missionary has
a great pull. He (in this case she) can show charity and good-
will in a clear, tangible, practical form, which is, generally
speaking, much appreciated. These lady doctors appeared to
go in specially for opium cures. They, like most of the
missionaries one meets in China, had a great deal to say against
the habit of opium-smoking, and described very vividly its evil
consequences and the difficulty of getting rid of the habit when
once acquired. This, in fact, seems to be one of the greatest
objections to it. A man who has once acquired the habit
cannot get out of it. Miss Murdock described to me how men
affected in this way used to come and implore her to cure
them ; but her only effectual method was to confine them.
She would make them pay for their food, and also produce
a surety who would be responsible, if the patient died, for the
removal of the body. In this stern way she had effected many
cures, though she was disappointed at times in finding her
patient going back to the habit again when temptation was
thrown in his way.

M. Ivanoff, a Russian tea-merchant, was another of the
Europeans I met at Kalgan. It is always a pleasure to meet
a Russian. He is invariably so frank and hearty. No one
would ever accuse a Russian of not being warm-hearted, and
to a stranger in a strange land this Russian merchant was
particularly so. He at once produced maps and books to