The students have been collecting a fund for our new Science building, a great and beautiful enterprise, which, also, is still in its proper stage. The drawing of plans so large and detailed has occupied many months. We are looking to America for the generous gift which shall bring these plans into actuality, but help from other sources is welcome, too, and particularly help from the students. They have made many efforts and reached a sum of more than Rs. 500. Their most important undertaking was a performance of "Everyman" most solemnly and beautifully carried out before an audience of our women friends, and there was also a dramatic version written by one of the students of the parable of the prodigal son and performed before the college only. This last was remarkable in its adaptation of the story to Indian conditions and for the characteristic introduction of a mother and a sister. [Illustration: THE OLD INDIA No Chance--No Hope] "If she have sent her servants in our pain, If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword, If she have given back our sick again And to the breast the weakling lips restored, Is it a little thing that she has wrought? Then Life and Death and Motherhood be nought." _Kipling's "Song of the Women"_ The Medical School at Vellore is still without a permanent home and is lodged in scattered buildings--without a permanent staff except for two or three heroic figures who are performing each the work of several--without a certainty of a regular income in any way equivalent to its needs--but it has an enthusiastic band of students and it has Dr. Ida Scudder, and so the balance is on the right side. [Footnote *: Opposing the study of the Bible in our schools.] CHAPTER FIVE SENT FORTH TO HEAL "THE Long Trail A-Winding." Who that has read "Kim" will ever forget Kipling's picture of the Grand Trunk Road, with its endless panorama of beggars, Brahmans, Lamas, and talkative old women on pilgrimage? Such roads cover India's plains with a network of interlacing lines, for one of Britain's achievements on India's behalf has been her system of metalled roads, defying alike the dust of the dry season and the floods of the monsoon. One such road I have in mind, a road leading from the old fortress town of Vellore through twenty-three miles of fertile plain, to Gudiyattam, at the foot of the Eastern Ghats. It is just a South Indian "up country" road, skirting miles of irrigated rice fields, gold-green in their beginnings, gold-brown in the days of ripening and reaping. It winds past patches of sugar cane and cocoanut palm; then half arid uplands, where goats and lean cattle search for grass blades that their predecessors have overlooked; then the _bizarre_ shapes of the ghats, wide spaces open to the play of sun and wind and rain, of passing shadow and sunset glory. They are among the breathing spaces of earth, which no man hath tamed or can tame. An Indian "Flivver."