At the close of one of the terms of the teachers’ preparation class, prizes were to be given for the best answers at their examination, and the first prize was to be the option of four yards of calico or a Bible. The one who on this particular occasion stood out preeminently first was a peasant youth of about eighteen years of age with exceptionally well-formed and forceful features. His dress consisted of a coarse piece of the bark-cloth knotted on the shoulder: having come from a distant district he had never known the luxury of the calico garments worn by the more fortunate town folk. As he came forward to receive his prize, the choice between the calico and the Bible was given him. For a while he stood handling the material, then looked down at his own shabby garment; but it was only a momentary hesitation—laying aside the calico, he took up the Bible and clasping it with both hands, said “My master, the Bible has got the better of the cloth.” CHAPTER XX Medical Work Realising that the acquisition of the language would be slow work, with no books to study, and only five hours teaching a week, I had decided on arriving in Toro to plunge into work right away. It was not a case of going out in search of work, for outside one’s very door was the mute call for help. When the tidings of our arrival had filtered through to the villages, sick folk came from every direction to see if the white women had brought medicine. In our courtyard each morning there was quite a large company of maimed, halt and blind, who had hobbled along, or been brought in, some from very long distances, by their friends. The very prevalent forms of skin diseases, ulcers, and the hacking cough required no language even for diagnosis by an amateur dispenser; other patients, by eloquent grunts and gesticulations, managed to convey some idea of their complaints; and the remaining class, whose language and sickness were conundrums to the European “quack,” received a mild dose of nauseous physic; certainly it did them no harm, and in some cases their faith in that dose of “white man’s medicine” worked the cure. At first I used to receive the sick folk on our verandah, but they became too numerous, so a removal was effected. The first house of the European missionary in Toro was still standing, but was quite uninhabitable, as it had been made of reeds which rot very quickly. It stood in a very forest of weeds. The long elephant grass barred all the windows and doors against would-be intruders, snakes suspiciously lay hidden among the thick tangled undergrowth, and a few half-choked flowers struggled to exist as a witness to a past cared-for garden and in protest against their present usurpers.