from her at the Fellowship Association were marked by a felicity of
phrase as well as an insight and spiritual fervour unusual in a girl.
Her alertness of intellect often astonished those who heard her engaged
in argument with the agnostics and freethinkers whom she encountered in
the course of her visiting. She spoke simply, but with a directness and
sincerity that arrested attention. Often asked to address meetings in
other parts of Dundee, she shrank from the ordeal. On one occasion a
friend went with her, but she could not be persuaded to go on the
platform. She sat in the middle of the hall and had a quiet talk on the
words, "The common people heard Him gladly." "And," writes her friend,
"the common people heard her gladly, and crowded round her and pleaded
that she should come again."




VI. A TRAGIC LAND

There was never a time when Mary was not interested in foreign
missions. The story of Calabar had impressed her imagination when a
child, and all through the years her eyes had been fixed on the great
struggle going on between the forces of light and darkness in the
sphere of heathenism. The United Presbyterian Church in which she was
brought up placed the work abroad in the forefront of its activity; it
had missions in India, China, Jamaica, Calabar, and Kaffraria; and
reports of the operations were given month by month in its _Missionary
Record_, and read in practically all the homes of its members. It was
pioneer work, and the missionaries were perpetually in the midst of
adventure and peril. Their letters and narratives were eagerly looked
for; they gave to people who had never travelled visions of strange