After a day or two with the Chieng Sên church, we visited the ridge to the southeast of that city, between it and Chieng Kawng. Our experience there was but a repetition of that from which we were just come—cordial receptions, night audiences, manifest interest, individual believers, anxious consultations, promises for the next year; but the tribal bond was too strong to be broken. But Cha Pū Kaw was anxious that we should not pass by his own mountain villages on the Mê Kok. So we turned southward again toward Chieng Rāi. This, moreover, was one of those famine years, such as we have already encountered in our story, and shall encounter yet again; many people were on the verge of starvation. In places we could not get food for our own men. And famine was beginning to be followed by disease and death. This was a serious obstacle to our work. Another serious obstacle was the use of opium, which became more prevalent the further west we went along the Mê Kok range towards Mûang Fāng. We presently reached villages where the poppy was cultivated, until, in the last village, men, women, and boys, and sometimes even girls, were its slaves. Fevers and dysentery prevail during the rainy season. These people have a very scanty pharmacopœia, and no antidotes whatever for these diseases. Opium in some form is probably their surest remedy. Many persons told me that they began by using it in sickness. As sickness recurred the habit grew, until they were fast bound in its chains. These facts largely determined the character of the instruction we gave, and made our tour a kind of anti-opium crusade. Encouraged and disappointed at every village, I was still tempted on by visions of capturing some large village that would prove a more effective entering wedge for the tribe than Cha Pū Kaw’s poor little hamlet. The six weeks so spent were at the time the most novel and exciting, as well as most arduous, of all my missionary experiences so far.