coaxed, and taught, had all deserted to be present at the burning of
three widows. Even the lepers in the tiny hospital that he had started
had limped out for a distant view. He had watched a year's work all
disintegrating in a minute at the call of bestial, loathsome,
blood-hungry superstition.

And he was a man of iron, as Christian missionaries go. He had been
hard-bitten in his youth and trained in a hard, grim school. In the
Isle of Skye he had seen the little cabin where his mother lived pulled
down to make more room for a fifty-thousand-acre deer-forest. He had
seen his mother beg.

He had worked his way to Edinburgh, toiled at starvation wages for the
sake of leave to learn at night, burned midnight oil, and failed at the
end of it, through ill health, to pass for his degree.

He had loved as only hard-hammered men can love, and had married after
a struggle the very thought of which would have melted the courage of
an ordinary man, only to see his wife die when her child was born. And
even then, in that awful hour, he had not felt the utterness of misery
such as came to him when he saw that his work in Howrah was undone. He
had given of his best, and all his best, and it seemed that he had
given it for nothing.

"Who was that man, father?" asked a very weary voice through which
courage seemed to live yet, as the tiniest suspicion of a sweet refrain
still lives through melancholy bars.

"The man who took your home letters to Mahommed Gunga."