As I ascended the river, it became plain that the water was too low to permit the latter stage of the trip to be made in my large boat. At Chiengmai I should find a house, but not a home. Before I could reach it, the touring season would be nearly over. The thought of stopping a season for work at Rahêng struck me favourably. The more I considered it, the more attractive it became. To be sure, I had not secured the sanction of the mission to that particular enterprise; but I had always been allowed to choose my own touring ground. An officer, Sên Utamā, offered me a site for a bamboo house gratis; and before I had announced my final decision, he and others began to cut bamboo on it to build the house. I had asked for guidance, and the question seemed to settle itself. I cannot dwell on the interesting six months of the year 1880 spent there. Sên Utamā was interested from the first. By affliction he had been wonderfully prepared for, and seemed to be waiting for, the very consolation that the Gospel offered him. An ex-tax-collector, a Chinese of some influence, was in the same state of mind, and soon joined the other as an enquirer. My student, Noi Intachak, entered heartily into the work. Soon, with my cook and boy, we had the nucleus of quite an interesting congregation who attended worship twice a day. It was a delight to teach them. The case of the Chinese was deeply interesting. He believed the Gospel plan of salvation, and was deeply anxious to be saved from his sin and its punishment. But there was one serious obstacle in the way of his making an open profession—he had two wives. The real wife—the one he had formally married—was childless. The one he had bought was younger, and had two lovable little children, both girls. I recall almost with tears the burning questionings we had over that situation. He seemed willing to make any self-sacrifice that duty required. But what was duty? Should he divorce one of them? If so, which one? “Of course, he must keep the real one,” you will say. But what of the young mother and the helpless babes? The very mention of their being turned adrift, even with a dower, had produced a scene in the family. The poor woman felt quite unable to care for the children alone. The children were his children. It might easily have been the ruin both of mother and babes to put her away. My heart was not hard enough to advise that. Surely the man had not cut himself off from the hope of salvation by his past—by an error or sin of ignorance. The conditions of church-membership are faith and repentance. The sacraments of the church are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Shall we offer a man the pardon of his sin without its sacramental seals?—the glorious hope of endless fellowship in heaven, but not the communion of saints on earth? A precisely parallel case I had met before in the person of a native doctor at Mûang Awn. “What then,” the reader will ask, “did you do?” Why, in each case I just did nothing. I followed the