“After entering the city wall at Nanking we drove the seven miles to a rented Chinese house where I was living, which was to serve as their home for the time being. One of the drivers told the boys that we were going to dig out their eyes and cut out their stomachs. This awesome news, coupled with a little homesickness, was probably the cause of two of them running away the very next day. We had to send four or five to the Methodist hospital to be treated, and two of the older boys who were allowed to go along ran away. But their places have been filled by three others, two of whom I had to leave in the hospital at Hwai Yuan.”[45] [Sidenote: A Persian “Helen Keller.”] What provision is there for the blind, the deaf and dumb, the crippled children in non-Christian lands? Would you care to know the number of children whose fate is like that of the Mohammedan girl who was brought by her grandmother to the missionary dispensary in Persia? She was deaf, dumb, and blind, and her grandmother pleaded with the lady physician to do something to cure her. The girl shrank in fright as a strange hand touched her and then every tense muscle in her body showed amazement and relief when the hand proved to be gentle and loving. Again the grandmother brought her, saying, “You _must_ find a remedy. There is nothing we can do with her. Must I kill her?” and the missionary’s heart was broken because she could not cure and there was absolutely no institution to which to take the girl. Some years later a younger deaf and dumb girl was brought to the dispensary by a woman whose face seemed familiar and who turned out to be the despairing old grandmother. “Where is the older girl?” asked the doctor. “Oh,” exclaimed the old woman, while the tears rained down her face, “I had to kill her. There was nothing else to do!” Who knows what there was behind that wall of blindness and deafness,--who knows what might have been the result had the Mohammedan Helen Keller had her fair chance? Which members of the “organized motherhood for the children of the world” will see to it that there are means and workers enough to give these children their inalienable rights? The work is barely begun, but is full of promise. [Sidenote: Blind children in India.] “According to the last census, the number of blind persons in the Indian Empire is 600,000. Little was done for them until Miss Asquith, superintendent of the school for Tamil girls in Palamcotta, founded a school for blind children a few years ago. Her success was so great that she resigned her lucrative position and gave herself and all her time to the care of the blind. Now the English Government will aid her in the erection of two substantial school buildings, one for boys, the other for girls, that she may give both a more complete education.”[46] [Sidenote: Work for the deaf.]