One day some fifteen years earlier than the point we have now reached in our narrative, a letter came to our mission from a Mr. Robert Arthington of Leeds, England. The letter, like all his subsequent ones, was on small sheets of notepaper, written over once, and then written again crosswise, so as to be almost illegible. The writer had somewhere learned of the journey of a French explorer who, from the upper Mê Kōng and the headwaters of the Mê Ū, had crossed to the China Sea through the region now known as Tonking. The traveller had passed through certain tribes possessed of a written language and supposed to be of Aryan stock. By some means Mr. Arthington had heard of our mission, and wrote to enquire whether some of us could not visit those tribes and distribute among them “the Gospels of John and of Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles,” particularly “telling them that the Acts followed Luke, _and was by the same author_.” We had not the slightest idea who the writer was; but the devout spirit of the letter was charming, and such interest in obscure tribes along the northern border of our field was most surprising. His strong desire to send the Gospel message to “the regions beyond” appealed to me. He appeared to be a man of means, for he offered to bear the expense of circulating those three books. At the same time he was evidently somewhat eccentric and impractical in his ideas. He seemed not to have thought that to circulate books among newly discovered tribes would require—since the cessation of the gift of tongues—acquisition of their languages, translation, printing-presses, etc., etc. But the case, at all events, seemed worth following up. I acknowledged the receipt of his letter, pointing out the obstacles which he seemed to overlook, directing his attention to our own mission as occupying a new and interesting field, with many hill-tribes on our own border which we hoped to reach. I invited his coöperation, stating that as soon as we were properly enforced, we intended to go as far north as we could.