pioneers of medical enterprise in the mission field; he knew, too, that
he had already worked for some years at Hankow before he met and married
Miss Corinna Meecham, formerly of Drayton, Georgia, but at that time a
teacher in a Chinese school supported by one of the great American
churches. Events after that seemed to have followed rapidly. Within a
few years the babe who was to become Peter Davenant had seen the light,
the mother had died, and the father had perished as the victim of a
rising in the interior of Hupeh. The child, being taken to America, and
unclaimed by relatives, was brought up in the institution maintained for
such cases by the Missionary Board of the church to which his father and
mother had given their services. He had lived there till, when he was
seven years old, Tom and Sarah Davenant, childless and yet longing for
a child, had adopted him.

These short and simple annals furnished all that Davenant knew of his
own origin; but after the visit to Hankow the personality of his parents
at least became more vivid. He met old people who could vaguely recall
them. He saw entries in the hospital records made by his father's hand.
He stood by his mother's grave. As for his father's grave, if he had
one, it was like that of Moses, on some lonely Nebo in Hupeh known to
God alone. In the compound Davenant saw the spot on which his father's
simple house had stood--the house in which he himself was born--though a
wing of the modern hospital now covered it. It was a relief to him to
find that, except for the proximity of the lepers' ward and the opium
refuge, the place, with its trim lawns, its roses, its clematis, its
azaleas, its wistaria, had the sweetness of an English rectory garden.
He liked to think that Corinna Meecham had been able to escape from her
duties in the crowded, fetid, multi-colored city right outside the gates
to something like peace and decency within these quiet walls.