[Sidenote: A Chinese City.] “We hired a bearer and proceeded through the endless confusion of the narrow, dirty streets of Canton, through the evil smells of a many-thousand-year-old decaying culture, on past all the innumerable shops and idol temples, halls of justice and idol altars, past all the numberless human forms, poor and rich, well and sick, vested with silk or covered with rags, painted with vermilion or consumed with leprosy, which flood the lanes of the giant city of Southern China, out through the great iron Northern gate, through several streets of the suburbs, past scattered huts--and now the great alluvial plain of the Northstream delta stretches before our eyes. A pure air breathes over the land and encompasses us after we have escaped the exhalations which rest, suffocating and heavy, upon the city of a million souls. [Sidenote: In the Mountains.] “In the schools and on the crossways, where the passing wayfarers were resting in the tea-huts, we sought opportunities to preach the Word of God. Often we found them, often we waited in vain. Many a guest listened an instant, then silently took up his bundle and went on his way. There was nothing in the proclamation of the Word that engaged the man’s interest. Companies of heathen hungry for salvation, and hanging upon the lips of the missionary, were not to be found in the mountains; such, we may well say, are not to be found anywhere in China. The Lord alone knows where a seed-corn of eternity sinks into a human heart. The man takes it with him; often it sinks out of reach or is choked by the thorns and briers of heathenism, yet often, after the lapse of years, it shoots up again into the light. At one tea-hut, which was covered with the leaves of the fern palm, there gathered around us a great company of women. They were burdened with stones out of the neighboring quarry, at the same time carrying their infants on their hips. They laid off their loads and listened, and some asked very intelligent questions, ‘Sir, if we are not to worship idols, how shall we pray to the heavenly Father?’ A heathen, sitting near, disturbed us by his unseemly witticisms. The language is rich in such equivocal turns. People do not understand the reference, and are taken in by the seeming harmlessness of the phrase. The helper explained to me the more usual of them. They open a view into the hideous depths of heathenism.” This description was written many years ago. To-day the missionary historian rejoices to record that there are companies of Chinese hungry for the news of salvation. In many instances the largest auditoriums in great cities have proved too small for the throngs which pressed to attend evangelistic meetings. The Berlin Society has a staff of thirty-six missionaries in fifteen main stations. Its baptized Christians number about ten thousand.