One day a family party carried an invalid into the verandah of the Tarn Taran mission house. The missionary looked inside the _doolie_; she was not a doctor, and declined to undertake such a serious case, and told the men to take their invalid to the Amritsar Hospital. They were determined to take no such trouble. To show that she was equally determined to make them, she went inside the house and shut the doors and blinds. Who would hold out the longest? The result was a foregone conclusion. The Punjabis, armed with a greater disregard for a woman's life, gained the victory by the simple method of beating a retreat, leaving the helpless woman behind them. In common humanity she could not be left to die. In a few days her family returned to inquire, and were gratified to find her progressing towards recovery. The white woman's celebrity was now secured, and to her consternation and embarrassment she found her verandah full of patients, and, from overwork, was soon herself added to the number. The people of Tarn Taran afterwards gave the building for a Women's Mission Hospital, and a new one is now in the charge of a fully qualified lady doctor. Hospitals are by far the most satisfactory part of medical missions. In zenanas and dispensaries it is one thing to prescribe and give advice, and another for orders to be obeyed, especially if they are contrary to rules of caste or custom. It is well known that a Hindu soldier, who will follow his British officer into the fiercest _mêlée_, and, if necessary, die for him, if true to his own creed, will not receive a cup of water at his hands. When wounded his parched lips will close tightly, lest his caste should suffer. The same principle debars his womenfolk from accepting physic in a liquid form from Englishwomen. They may, however, take powders. Written directions are generally useless, and verbal ones often misunderstood. It is little wonder if dispensary patients make slow progress. "Are you sure you took the medicine I gave you?" inquired a medical missionary of one who made no advance at all. "Quite sure, Miss Sahiba." "How did you take it?" "I ate the paper and threw away the dust." This mistake was not astonishing under the circumstances. One Mohammedan specific is to swallow a paper pellet with the name of God written in Arabic; another, for the _mullah_ to write an Arabic inscription on a plate, and for the water that washes it off to be the dose. [Illustration: A GROUP OF WORKERS AT THE DUCHESS OF CONNAUGHT'S HOSPITAL. (_Dr. Wheeler stands at the left-hand side of group._)]