Even the missionaries could not credit it, not even Miss Howe, whose interest in the family was peculiarly keen, since Maiyü's mother was the first fruits of her work for Chinese women, and had ever since been working with her. To be sure Mrs. Shih had said to her, "If the Lord gives me a little daughter I shall not bind her feet." But Miss Howe had made so many efforts to induce the women and girls with whom she had worked to take off the crippling bandages, without having been successful in a single instance, that she did not build her hopes on this. One day, when calling in the home and seeing little Maiyü, then five years old, playing about the room, she remarked, "My dear Mrs. Shih, you will not make a good job of it unless you begin at once to bind little Maiyü's feet." But Mrs. Shih never faltered in the purpose which she and her husband had formed at the little girl's birth, and promptly answered, "Did I not tell you I should not bind her feet?" The first years of Maiyü's life were unusually happy ones. Her father was a pastor in the Methodist church, and had charge of the "Converting to Holiness" chapel in Kiukiang; her mother was successfully conducting a day school for girls. From her mother Maiyü received much of her earliest instruction and before she was eight years old she had studied several of the Chinese classics and memorized the Gospel of Matthew and the catechism in Chinese so thoroughly that she has never forgotten them. But as she approached the age when custom required that her feet should be bound, the little girl discovered that the way of the pioneer is not an easy one. The unbound feet were a constant source of comment and ridicule, not only by older people, but by other children as well. She was stopped on her way to school one day by an older girl, who taunted her with her "big feet" and refused to let her pass unless she would kneel down and render obeisance to her own bandaged stumps. The small descendant of the proud house of Shih absolutely refused to submit to such humiliation; but it was only after her mother's assistance had been invoked that she was allowed to proceed on her way.