opportunity for creative work--creative as one helps to mould the new
education of new India; creative as one reverently helps to fashion some
of the lives that are to be new India itself. More too, as the rebound
comes back to one's self in a life too full for loneliness, too
obsessing for self-interest. Does it pay? Try it for yourself and see.

One bright noon in North India, sixty years ago, a young missionary on
an evangelistic tour among the villages paused to rest by the wayside.
As he paced up and down beneath the tamarind trees, pondering the
problem of India's womanhood, shut in the zenanas beyond the reach of
the Gospel which he was bringing to the little villages, there fell at
his feet a feather from a vulture's wing. Picking it up, he whimsically
cut it into a quill. Thinking that his sister in far-away America might
like a letter from so strange a pen, he went into his tent and wrote to
her. He told her of the millions of girls shut up in those "citadels of
heathenism," the zenanas of India,--a problem which only Christian women
might hope to solve. Half playfully, half in earnest, he added, "Why
don't you come out and help?" As swift as wind and wave permitted was
Isabella Thoburn's answer, "I am coming as soon as the way opens!"

Already a group of women, stirred to the depths by the words of Mrs.
Edwin W. Parker and Mrs. William Butler, returned missionaries from
India, were forming a Society to help the women and girls of Christless
lands. At the first public meeting of this Woman's Foreign Missionary
Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, though but twenty women were
present with but three hundred dollars in the treasury, when they
learned that Isabella Thoburn,--gifted, consecrated, wise,--was ready to
go to India, they exclaimed, "Shall we lose Miss Thoburn because we have
not the needed money in our hands to send her? No, rather let us walk
the streets of Boston in our calico dresses, and save the expense of