A MISSIONARY, perhaps more than most men, has his memory stored with unfinished stories. When I look into my 'chambers of imagery' I find them filled with the faces and forms of unforgettable people, many of whom I never saw but once. A multitude of these I met on trains; but of many I cannot now recall any circumstance: only their faces, with perhaps some significant gesture or arresting garb, stay with me suddenly revitalized by a secret association I am not able to trace. Or, sometimes, they appear before me when I am in prayer, faces consciously or unconsciously appealing, and I can but pray for them, though I have no other remembrance of them.

During my twenty-eight years in India, I usually traveled in the 'women's box,' as we call it in Marathi a compartment reserved for third-class Indian women passengers, which in the cruder days of my childhood used to be labeled 'Females Only.' The European Third was rarely as interesting as this Women's Third, where one often met women one could have met in no other way. Either their own prejudices, or those of their family or neighbors, would have barred their doors to a foreigner, for in India fear of what 'they' will say hedges the ways of the women especially; but on a journey curiosity and tedium break down prejudice and timidity, at least for the time, and one meets with much friendliness. There are no prying neighbors' eyes in a train,

the usual restraints are suspended, 'Madame Mother-in-law' may not be along, ‘King-husband' is in the 'men's box,' and so to many women a journey becomes a holiday on which they feel an exhilarating freedom and gala excitement. Besides, the fact that they are in a train at all has already defiled them, if they are of high caste, so that they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and enjoy themselves as much as possible.

A journey I took nearly sixteen years ago is one of those I love to remember. I was on my way to spend May, my summer vacation, with one of the most unselfish women that ever lived. Her idolized mother, very old and tiny and frail, was expected to die, and her friends could not bear that Grace should be alone when this happened. She lived in Inampur, a little old-fashioned village ten miles off the railway, and was, I think, about one hundred miles from any other American or European; but, like myself, she was born in the Maharashtra (the Marathi-speaking country) and was at home anywhere in it. A friend, who keenly regretted the necessity, had already brought a coffin from a distant workshop and placed it in a storeroom, since in India burial or burning must follow death within twenty-four hours. To Grace it was all agony, but she hid it with a whitely serene face, and the tenderer solicitude for the sufferers who came to her little dispensary. Only once did she speak of

the desolation that approached her: 'Ah, no matter how long beforehand one may know, it can be no easier when it comes!'

Of the journey from my own province of Berar to Bombay, where I stayed a night, I remember little; but from Bombay to Inampur in the Southern Maratha Country, as it is named, the journey lives again whenever I recall it. I got into the train at six in the morning and found at one end of the Women's Third a group of Brahmin widows on their way to Vithoba's shrine at Pandharpur, which is the greatest Hindu shrine in all the Maratha country. They carried the little triangular saffron flags on slender poles which are borne on pilgrimage by Vithoba's devotees. Each of them had little bundles of bedding and foodstuffs (flour, rice, pulse, spices, certain sweets, parched grains-anything ceremonially pure, which may therefore be taken on a train without defilement), and these they would carry on their heads or tied behind their waists when they got off the train. They were full of zeal and anticipation; and one of them, a thin, masterful little woman with square jaws, high cheek-bones, and fiery, fanatical eyes, led them in singing songs from Tukaram, Vithoba's greatest lover. He was a poet-reformer of the seventeenth century who was bitterly persecuted, and by that same token is now accounted a great saint and is greatly beloved. He and his songs have permeated the whole Maharashtra.

ness or heaviness, of questioning wistfulness or that heartbreaking patience to which one never gets quite used. While they sang, their faces lightened and their eyes brightened; but afterward the older ones dozed with the 'easy sleep of old age,' or sat telling their beads, while two, who seemed happier than the others and whose soft old cheeks were rounder, sang the cow song.

It is interminable. Every stanza, two or three times repeated, praises some member of the cow's thrice-sacred body: her horns, her brow, her eyes, her nostrils, her teeth and tongue, her dewlap, udder, teats, tail tail-literally every part of her, for in each dwells a god. They sang and sang in little thin high voices that were full of enjoyment in the words, in their own singing, and in this long-anticipated pilgrimage. Pilgrimages, however real the devotion and hunger that may inspire them, and however real the hardship involved, especially before there were railways, are nevertheless desired holidays, and furnish that change which William James says is a vital need of our kind. A Marathi proverb says that pilgrims are of three sorts: naushi, haushi, and gaushi. Naushi are they who go to pay vows vows the religious; haushi, they who go for pleasure the frivolous and voluptuous; and gaushi may be construed to mean the profiteers who have wares to sell and tricks to play on trustful ignorance.

- to be

I was very much interested in the singing and the singers, but they were naturally shy of me. They had probably classed me as a 'defiler' come a Christian is to be defiled; besides that, I doubtless ate beef and other abominations. I was really persona non grata in that pure company; however, I could see that they were observing and listening while I talked with other women, and that their eyes grew kinder as they watched.

II

The other women, of whom there were plenty, were the usual mixture of all castes, and promptly put me through the usual catechism: Where did I live? Where was I going? Why was I going? They were going to weddings; to 'look at' girls, for boys in their families; to visit their mothers, perhaps for confinement; or to wheedle a loan out of some kinsman.

How many children had I? I felt a slight chill when I had to confess to none, for it was at once evident that I had a pitiably 'cracked destiny'; besides, childless women may be inauspicious, and are very likely to have an evil eye.

Where was my master? Was he in the men's box? When I said I had none my lucklessness was established, for what can be more misfortunate and inauspicious than a widow? One sad young thing of the Phul-mali (flowergardeners') caste, who though she was not shaven, as Brahmin widows are, yet lacked the black bead necklace, the glass bangles, and scarlet kunku browmark of wifehood, touched her forehead sympathetically to show that none can evade the fate written there, and asked how long before my lord had died. Then the unimagined, the outrageous fact appeared that I had never married, and the chill increased perceptibly I was evidently not even virtuous!

One wearies a little of that bleak tribunal, though it is rather good fun in the end to win them over all by one's self. However, one sometimes has help; and a Maratha woman with keen humorous eyes and a kind sensitive mouth came gallantly to my rescue. "These people do not always marry,' she said. "Their customs seem strange to us, but their unmarried women are very virtuous and given to good works.'

I had then to explain those customs.

Shocking and dangerous they sounded to Indian ears- certainly not nice. Marriage a matter of choice, and delayed until the twenties! Men choosing their own wives, and women saying yes or no as they pleased the hussies! One indignant pattern of virtue spat her disgust out the window, and several old women shook their heads; but one or two very young ones looked interested, and even tittered discreetly. The Maratha woman's eyes twinkled at me, and she gave her brows a little lift and her head a little wag that spoke volumes of amused sympathy. I talked some more and got them laughing; then I took the offensive and got in a little preachment about child-marriage and our heartbreaking Indian mortality in babies and childmothers. There were sighs and nods from some, while others maintained stoutly that it was all a matter of fate and the will of the gods. There was no dodging one's karma. If a child was fated to live you might throw it on stones and it would be unharmed; but if it had come only for a season, to pay or collect some old debt, nothing could keep it, once the account was even. The old ways were best. There had been a neighbor who had had his head turned by sudharlele (reformed) folk in Poona and had thought to save his daughter from the early widowhood betokened in her horoscope by keeping her unmarried until she was fifteen, but the wedding was scarcely over when the bridegroom sickened and died. Of what avail to contend with the gods?

But one sturdy goodwife of the Lohar (blacksmith) caste grew restive at the reiteration of anything so obvious as the inevitability of fate. When the talk had been of infant mortality, she had offered a few infallible remedies:

'For sore mouth,' said she, 'find a

black goat without one hair of other color on it, hold it fast, and swab the babe's mouth with the goat's tail. The swelling will go down in one night.

'For a stake in the belly (severe colic) remove the evil eye: make passes over the child with a packet of peppers, both red and black, a bhilava (blistering nut), a hair of the head, and dust from three roads. Burn the packet. This has more virtue than peppers alone, or to make passes with only a besom or an old shoe. A barren woman put her eye on my boy last month when I got him a new gold-embroidered cap for the wedding of my younger dir's (husband's brother's) elder son. "What a handsome cap!" she said, and the poor child screamed with colic child screamed with colic that night. But I made up a good packet, and in three days the strumpet had sore eyes (ophthalmia). May the eyes of all evil-eyed ones break!' And the good soul had stowed a huge wad of consoling betel leaf, areca nut, and tobacco into her cheek.

After that her interest waned; she burned for knowledge; so presently came more questions: Why did I wear a hat? What did I do? How much pay did I get? Why did I sit with 'black people' - they were all of pleasant shades of brown, and beautiful olive-when I belonged to the 'king-people'? Were white women real women in every particular? Even so and so?

'These be very deep questions,' said the Maratha woman then very gravely, and some looked abashed; but the smith-wife was bashless: 'Nay, I wish to know. Folk say thus and thus is it true or false?' It happened to be false, and she was disappointed.

Then I steered the talk into pleas anter channels. It veered to religion: Why did we defile people? And presently I was telling again the ineffable

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story of the Perfect Life to rapt listeners. One never knows how wonderful the story is until one tells it to someone who has never heard it. A question, a gesture of amazement, a shake of the head, a sigh, from one and another, marked the progress of the story from ancient prophecy, Annunciation, holy Nativity and angel-songs, through more than thirty years of unimaginable exile, to the Cross. 'Hai, hai!' said they then, 'hai, hai!' And in the Maratha woman's eyes were tears. Then the light of Easter Morning shone down the centuries, and some faces were very wistful when I repeated the last great promise, 'Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.'

He had not left us orphaned, and He would come again. He had said it. He was not a private, tutelar god, nor any foreign god. He was for them as much as for me. God loved the world. He loved them. He wanted them themselves, not offerings of goats, nor cocks, nor coconuts; not prostrations, nor circumambulations, nor penances and tortures; but their very hearts and all their love.

It was good talk, they said. It was true talk. It was very sweet and heartening talk. There were there all the four soils of the parable: hearts as insensitive as the trodden path, shallow hearts, and hearts still wedded to their cares; but I knew that some would cherish the story, and that in them it would live; that in the darkness of their manifold fears a Light had shined. The story is still the Gospel.

'And tell me,' said the sturdy one of the deep question, 'why you put no coconut oil on your hair. It looks very untidy!' We were nearing Poona, where I must change trains, so I opened my Gospel box, in which were Gospels in eight languages. Could any of them read, I asked. The Maratha woman