Already a group of women, stirred to the depths by the words of Mrs. Edwin W. Parker and Mrs. William Butler, returned missionaries from India, were forming a Society to help the women and girls of Christless lands. At the first public meeting of this Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, though but twenty women were present with but three hundred dollars in the treasury, when they learned that Isabella Thoburn,--gifted, consecrated, wise,--was ready to go to India, they exclaimed, "Shall we lose Miss Thoburn because we have not the needed money in our hands to send her? No, rather let us walk the streets of Boston in our calico dresses, and save the expense of more costly apparel!" Thus was answered the letter written with the feather from the vulture's wing by the wayside in India. In 1870, Isabella Thoburn gathered six little waifs into her first school in India, a one-roomed building in the noisy, dusty bazaar of Lucknow. From this brave venture have grown the Middle School, the High School, and finally in 1886 the first woman's Christian College in all Asia, housed in the Ruby Garden, Lal Bagh. Here for thirty-one years Isabella Thoburn lived and loved and labored for the girls of India. CHAPTER THREE I. THE GARDEN OF HID TREASURE Prelude: Why go to College? "Why should an Indian girl want a college education?" queried Mary Smith, as she listened to her roommate's account of the "Lighting of the Christmas Candles." "I can see why she would need to learn to read and write, and even a high school course I wouldn't mind; but college seems to me perfectly silly, and an awful waste of good money. Why, from our own home high school there are only six of us at college." Mary Smith, fresh from "Main Street," may be less provincial than she sounds. Her question puts up a real problem. When only one girl in one hundred has a chance at the Three R's, is it right to "waste money" on giving certain others the chance to delve into psychology and higher mathematics? When there is not bread enough to go around, why should some of the family have cake and pudding? Something less than a hundred years ago, similar questions were vexing the American public. Those were the days when Mary Lyon fought her winning battle against the champions of the slogan "The home is woman's sphere," the days in which the pioneers of women's education foregathered from the rocky farmslopes of New England, and Mt. Holyoke came into being. Mary Smith, who is duly born, baptized, vaccinated, and registered for Vassar, the last requiring no more volition on her part than the first, realizes little of the ancient struggle that has made her privilege a matter of course. They are much the same old arguments that must be gone over again to justify college education for our sisters of the East. Rather say argument, in the singular, for there is just one that holds, and that is the possibilities for service that such education opens up.