hoped that her youngest son John would be a missionary. But God had other
plans. John became sick. He was sent to New Zealand for his health, but
died when he arrived in that country. Was there to be no missionary from
the Slessor family?

Whenever missionaries came to the Wishart Church or to Dundee, Mother
Slessor, Mary, Susan and Janie would go to hear them. At home they would
read the stories of missionaries and their work. They read missionary
magazines. They read about the missionaries in China, Africa, Japan, India,
and even Calabar.

One day William Anderson, a missionary to the West Coast of Africa, came to
the little church. He told of the great need for missionaries in Africa. He
told of the bad things which the people did who did not know Jesus.

Sitting in church, listening to the missionary, Mary saw in her mind a
picture of Africa. It was not a beautiful picture. She saw captured Negroes
being taken to other lands as slaves. She saw alligators and crocodiles
swimming in the muddy waters, ever ready to eat black children who would
come too close to the river. She saw cannibal chiefs at their terrible
feasts and fearful battles with spears and arrows. She saw villages where
trembling prisoners dipped their hands in boiling oil to test their guilt;
where wives were killed to go with their dead chief into the
spiritland. But these things did not frighten the Scottish girl who was
afraid to cross a field if a cow was in it. She longed to go to Africa.

"Why don't I become a missionary?" Mary asked herself as she worked the
looms in the factory. "Can I leave my home? Does Mother still need my help?
Susan and Janie are working now. They could get along without me. But will
I be brave enough? There are tropical jungles, and black men who eat