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Happily, all the women in India are not secluded in zenanas. By far the largest proportion live in the villages, but their notions of propriety are very strict. The hard-working field-women will hide themselves on the suspicion of a sahib being within reach. When once they are satisfied that the visitor belongs to their own sex and is harmless, crowds beset the missionary encampments. Many tales of suffering are poured into sympathising ears.

"I am blind from crying for my only son" is not an infrequent complaint. Nothing can be done in this case.

"There is no god or goddess to love a Hindu woman. Whatever offerings we make her, the goddess of small-pox smites us, and then the men say the women have not offered enough, and are angry." This was the reply of a Punjabi woman, who spoke for her friends and neighbours.

One Bengali woman told a missionary of the death of a precious baby boy. There did not seem much the matter, but the hakim (a native quack) first gave him something burning to swallow, and then applied a red-hot iron to each side in turn; and the child only drew one or two breaths after this treatment. This also, one hopes, was kindly meant. The Hindus are by no means wanting in humanity, but ignorance is often as fatal as cruelty.

Many patients find an excuse for coming again and again to the dispensaries. There they hear of blessings in this world and the next which they say seem too good to be true. They see love shining in the earnest faces, and feel it in the touch of hands that will not shrink from dressing repulsive sores.

The majority of cases in dispensaries are ordinary fevers or skin diseases resulting from dirt, and other scourges that follow defiance of elementary rules of health.

Patients discharged as cured often return. "Tell me again that Name that I can say when I pray," one of them asked, to explain the reappearance of her shrivelled old face; "I forget so soon." And she went on her way repeating the Name that even some of the heathen realise must be exalted above all others.

"I know that your Jesus must reign over our land," a Punjabi woman said to a lady who had opened a dispensary at Tarn Taran, a sacred city of the Sikhs; "I know it, because your religion is full of love and ours has none at all."

The mission hospital at this city, with the name which literally means "The Place of Salvation," and the dispensary seen in the illustration, came mainly into being through the determination of the inhabitants. A suffering baby might claim a share in its existence. This infant's mother brought it to a missionary whose training as a nurse had made her a friend in sickness. The child's sight was hopelessly gone. The mother said that the hakim had told her alum was good for sore eyes, so she had put it under the lids.

"You have used it in such a way as to blind your baby," the missionary said; "and I could have told you what to do."

"How should I know?" the woman replied, using a common phrase to express helplessness or lethargy; but she told the story to her friends, and other mothers, whose babies' eyes were suffering, soon proved that the white woman had made no empty boast. Ophthalmia is terribly common in India, and its marvellous cures began to be famous.

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.

A GROUP OF WORKERS AT THE DUCHESS OF CONNAUGHT'S HOSPITAL.

(Dr. Wheeler stands at the left-hand side of group.)

It is well when superstition and misconception stop short at swallowing paper and inky water. A woman, seriously injured from an accident, was carried into the Duchess of Connaught Hospital, Peshawur. Her husband accompanied her, and saw the medical missionary in charge carefully attend to fractures and bruises. Rest and sleep and quiet were doing their work, and the man was left to watch. A sudden crash startled the ward. The husband had turned the bedstead over on its side, and flung his wife down. He fancied she was dying, and said it would imperil her soul if it departed whilst she lay on anything but the floor. He had the satisfaction of knowing that she died where he placed her. This was a case of a Hindu "sinning religiously." It would be harder to forgive the frequent sacrifice of life to superstition, if there were no ennobling element underlying it of honest desire for some vague spiritual good.

The Duchess of Connaught Hospital is a permanent memorial of her Royal Highness's kind interest in the women of India. Whilst on the North-Western Frontier she went through the Dispensary and Nursing Home which represented the first effort to bring medical aid to the Afghan women, and allowed it to be called after her name. A new and much larger building, of which a drawing has been reproduced, has taken the place of the native quarters, where Mohammedan bigotry was by slow degrees overcome. For years