dainty, high-class lady replied, "It matters not to what place; if you are
willing to go, I will go with you."

Within a few weeks they left Foochow to work among their first
parishioners, a people who might well have caused the hearts of the young
pastor and his wife to fail, for Hü Yong Mi says of them: "In front of
their houses I saw piles of refuse, and filthy ditches. Within, all was
very dirty--pigs, cattle, fowls, sheep, all together in the one house. Not
a chair was there to sit on. All went out to work in the fields. They had
no leisure to comb hair or wash faces.... None knew how to read the Chinese
characters. Some held their books upside down; some mistook a whole column
for one character." Mrs. Hü and the children were very ill with malarial
fever while in this place, but in spite of all their hardships, a good work
was done.

Mrs. Hü was as earnest a worker among the women as was her husband among
the men, telling the good news to those who had never heard it, and
strengthening her fellow-Christians. Many a programme of the Foochow
Women's Conference bears the name of Mrs. Hü Yong Mi, for she could give
addresses and read papers which were an inspiration to missionaries and
Chinese alike. Her friend, Mrs. Sites, has written especially of her
influence on the women whose lives she touched: "In the stations where the
Methodist itinerancy sent Rev. Hü Yong Mi, this Christian household was
something of a curiosity. The neighbouring women often called 'to see' in
companies of three to twenty or more, and Mr. Hü expected his wife and
children to preach the gospel to them just as faithfully as he did from the
pulpit. There are many hundreds of Chinese women to whom this lovely
Christian mother and little daughters gave the first knowledge of Christ
and heaven." The same friend says of this wife and mother, "In privations
oft, and in persecutions beyond the power of pen to narrate, she has