"Missionaries are very good sort of people in their way. I often wonder how they can keep it up." "Keep what up?" asked Eola, mystified. "Their spirits and their belief that they are doing these natives good." "Of course they are doing good, Mrs. Hulver," said Eola, as if she were slightly shocked. The half-formed doubt occasionally slipped unbidden into her own mind but she had never put it into words. "I didn't say that they were not doing good. I left it open. As William--that was my first--used to say when the native overseers had too big a grasp on the profits: 'You can't wash a crow white nor expect anything of him but a croak.' It's the thought of the millions and millions of heathen in India that is apt to stagger one. It's like trying to empty a tank with a teaspoon. However, as William--that was my second--used to say when I was down-hearted about the way anything was going: 'You lay your brick and lay it sound and leave the rest to others. No man ever built a church steeple all by himself and yet old England is full of churches and steeples.' Anyway, I shouldn't like to be a missionary's wife. I could dress up to it; I could feed up to it; but I couldn't stand the converts trapesing through the compound and hanging about the verandahs. I shouldn't feel as if the house belonged to me." "Perhaps it wouldn't be necessary to have them there," suggested Eola, who read between the lines with secret amusement. "Oh! yes, it would; it's their reward; their right," replied Mrs. Hulver with conviction. "Any lady that's suitable to be a missionary's wife makes no objection; but she must be, so to speak, born to it. It's not a job that would suit you, miss. As William--that was my third--said when he heard that the Chaplain was going to marry the Colonel's daughter: 'If the church mouse takes the field mouse to wife there'll be a difference of opinion about the mode of living.' You could never put up with mission ways." "You never did any mission work, I suppose," said Eola, turning the conversation from a subject she was not prepared to discuss with her housekeeper. "No miss; but my husband William--that was my second--he tried his hand at it once, only once. He saw some of the canteen servants doing pujah to a stone image that stood under a tree behind the canteen. He went up to them in the middle of the pujah and said: 'Boys, you're all going to hell that way.' One of them that served the Presbyterian minister spoke up and said: 'No sar! It's the Roman Catholics that are going to hell, not us!' William walked away without another word; and when I asked him about it, he said that missionary work wasn't his job, and that he would leave it to those who knew more about it than he did." "It was very good of him to make the attempt." Mrs. Hulver looked pleased at the praise and approbation of the departed William the second.