and bring that baby to me. I can take care of her.”

So she went, but before she arrived the baby had been murdered in a way too dreadful to tell.

It is rather entertaining to pick up, one after another, books and magazine articles written for children about the children of missionary lands, and to find them all starting out with the proposition, “Children are very much the same the world around.” How are we going to reconcile this statement with the fact that some children survive and even thrive upon treatment that would mean certain death to others? What would happen to the little American baby first opening his eyes on the world, if he were taken out of doors as the babies are in Central Africa between four and five o’clock in the morning, when the cold night winds are still abroad, and cold water were dashed over him, and he were left naked out there to dry? The cold water treatment of the Africans and the Lao differs widely from the baths of little ones in Japan where the water must be nearly boiling hot to be of the proper temperature. But in Persia it would be sure death to a newborn baby to be bathed at all,—he must be carefully rubbed with salt as were the properly-cared-for infants of Ezekiel’s time! (Ez. 16:4.) Then into a cradle he is not laid, but strapped, wound round and round until his little legs and arms are rigid and immovable, and the soft bones of the back of his head are flattened as he lies there day after day. Oh, how we long to pick him up and let him change places occasionally with one of the imperial babies of Japan, who must be held in some one’s arms day and night from the time of his birth until he can walk. But no, there he must lie, and, in order that he may not take cold and fall a victim to that dangerous enemy, fresh air, over the ridgepole of the cradle are thrown various coverings, most of which hang to the floor. A missionary told me that once when she wanted to look at a Syrian baby, she took off four blankets which had been thrown over the whole cradle, and then removed a Turkish towel folded double over the child’s face.

It is strange to learn in how many lands the mothers feel that they must wrap and tie and bind and swathe their babies until they are deprived of all power of motion, and lives and health are sadly endangered by too much rather than too little clothing. The Chinese mother dresses her baby in a tiny wadded jacket, then another, then another, saying perhaps, “It is five jackets cold to-day.” He is wrapped and tied up until the bundle with a baby at the centre can be rolled on the floor without hurting him, or may perchance act as a life-preserver if he falls off the houseboat into the canal. It is pretty sure to keep afloat until it can be pulled in with a boat hook.

A Persian Baby in His Cradle

Very differently clad are the “Coral Island Brownies” or the babies of Africa, who are not hampered with any clothes at all, and as they grow older simply wear a fringe of grass or a strip of calico about their waists.

It is easy to trace many of the cases of terrible eye disease among children in Egypt, Syria, and other warm countries to the utter lack of any protection to the eyes from the glaring sunlight. Often boat women are seen rowing in the bright sunlight in China with babies asleep on their backs, and nothing over the sensitive little eyes as their heads bob up and down in time with the oars.

It is often a great shock to the American missionary mother to see little heads wrapped and swathed in numerous cloths and kerchiefs, while the little feet are blue with cold. But then, the shock is reciprocal, and, while the mother is off conducting a meeting, her nurse is carefully making up for her negligence by wrapping up the head of the missionary baby until he is bathed in perspiration!