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WALK of a mile or more from the East Gate Chapel brought us to a division of the road where sat a smiling old man selling peanuts, and he informed us that we must go to the back door of the temple, as the students had demolished the idols and Gen. Sun had sealed up the front door. So to the back door we went, followed by a troop of small children and an almost equally large number of grownup children.

A more extraordinary sight was perhaps never seen in China. Literally thousands of idols were in every stage of demolition that a regiment of rollicking school boys could devise.

Perhaps you may still remember this rambling old temple with its central rooms full of colossal idols, corridors lined with fiendish faces, recesses full of grimacing devils, niches with skeleton gods glaring out, deified heroes of past wars with their numberless servants in the passageways, cobwebbed rooms with fairies, devils and deities, all huddled together.

Mighty banyans have grown up in the spacious courts since the original monastery was built, for it had its beginning before ever crusade put foot on the western shores of Asia. During these centuries thousands of idols have found their places in the sacred precincts, and of all these idols Tai Sang (Great Hill) was most revered. In the beginning of the "Great Ching" (Manchu) dynasty sacred earth was brought to Foochow from Shantung and made into this image. On the fifteenth day of the Third Moon he was paraded

about the streets in a sedan chair. His hat, though not exactly a Panama, cost the donors $75, and his coat was estimated at $150, so much gold had been interwoven.

Thirty-six Manchus carried his dignified personage around, and the crowd that followed was ugly indeed, if all the bystanders were not reverential. One time during the annual procession it was decided to carry him into a temple at the West Gate to spend the night before returning to his accustomed place. The bearers unwittingly carried him in backward, whereupon all the devil images shrieked aloud, and Tai Sang himself clasped his hands and groaned. All present testified to having heard unearthly noises in the temple at that time, and there were thousands there to testify that noise was being made.

His home was in the most stately court of the temple. An avenue of beautiful stone pillars led up to his great gilded chair. Between these pillars centuries of worshipers had carried incense and offerings. Here and there among the other idols was placed a son of Tai Sang to spy on the others and report to the father.

But there came a day when the students of Foochow felt a thrill of patriotism and groups of excited young boys pushed to the temple and made it the headquarters of those that wished to go North and fight the Imperial troops. Tai Sang had never heard such clamor inside or outside of his domain before. Outside were scores of weeping parents demanding the return of the truant

boys. Inside the locked doors there was drilling and speech-making and an exuberance of what passed under the name of patriotism.

Several days of this went by and the old temple was becoming dull, especially as the young heroes dared not go out in the daytime for fear that some irate parent would catch them by the ears and lead them off home. But one night, wonderful to relate, a shivering boy crept up to Tai Sang, who immediately began to radiate heat like a foreign stove. But the next day the boy found that the food was not to his liking and he decided to climb over the wall and escape home to mother, where some one would wait on him. In the excitement of getting home he forgot for some time to mention to his friends what Tai Sang had done for him.

In the meantime, on a night when things were dullest, one lad asked Tai Sang if he would go North and fight the Manchus with them, and just at that time Tai Sang had a downright ugly spell and refused to answer. After repeated urging he still remained pouting and not a sound did he utter. So the students said that if he was not willing to share the troubles of war with them they would chop him up and spill his blood on the ground and burn his bones.

Tai Sang was struck full in the face, Tai Sang of the thirty-six bearers, Tai Sang whom the ruler of tens of millions had worshiped! Such a deed had never been known in Foochow. But be it said of him that his glass eyes never quailed before his enemies, even when they tipped his chair over and sent him sprawling on the floor, where his subjects had beaten their heads on the stones. The students then dragged his fallen majesty out of the temple,

knocked the sacred clay from his wooden bones, burned them, and Tai Sang, most efficacious of gods, was no

more.

Leo the Isaurian never had such an iconoclastic frenzy as did those youths. They next tried their hand on the remaining divinities with most remarkable results. Colossal Buddhas had their faces punched in, others stood on their heads, while still others balanced themselves across the headless trunks of fellow gods. Some of the smaller idols. must have been strangled, they were so black in the face; and from the pallor of others, fright must have been the death of them.

Rows of idols that for ages had been sitting undisturbed behind their lattice screens suddenly found themselves lacking an eye, or an ear, or a top of the head. Hands were chopped off and put under feet; feet were chopped off and put in the hands of the owner; teeth were knocked out of some faces and added to others. One old longwhiskered idol had been favored by having his whiskers neatly braided, while his companion was completely demolished. An image that had worn a queue was promptly beheaded. Everything that schoolboy ingenuity could devise was practised on these helpless victims of clay.

It required so much physical effort that for ten nights the boys held high carnival in the doing of it. Three nights they had made bonfires of the images of wood, but the images of clay with stone bones could not be so easily destroyed. Heaps upon heaps of crushed and battered remains of stone and clay choked up the temple, and the boys moved out. It was truly a spectacle to make one stand aghast. Young China was entering her protest against the powers of darkness that had held

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her in bondage so long. But what is to take the place now of what they had rejected?

As we were leaving this temple the pastor of the East Gate church asked if we did not want to see Tai Sang's tomb.

"Tai Sang's tomb!" we exclaimed. "We thought that he was burned, at least all of him that could be burned."

"This is another, the original Tai Sang," he replied. "In the reign of the Emperor Do-guong the original fell over and his head fell off. The priests buried him just back of the temple and made a very nice tomb for the remains."

We walked back to see the place and found that the boys had not forgotten to wreck the tomb of the former Tai Sang.

From here we went to the Temple of Blood. This old temple always gave visitors a feeling of horror, for all Chinese women fear lest some time their souls might be condemned and be put down under that pool of filthy water in a more vile pool of blood, from which there would be no escape.except at the expense of securing the prayers of the priests.

This temple was swept and garnished, literally. The horrible idols that stood around the walls, whose pleasure it was to seize and put to death newborn babes, have been tossed into the pool, and the water was thick with the yellow clay of false devils. A young Buddhist priest stood and looked sadly into the pool of thick, muddy water. His cherished idols were all dissolved beforehand.

We felt that the temple we stood in was symbolic of China. The young generation are casting out entirely the old faith. What is to be put in this swept and garnished temple? With the

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old faith have gone the old restrictions also. It is a great gain to have the old shackles removed, but the new freedom is a dangerous thing until its true use is learned.

We left the temples, so old and rich in historical associations, full of legends and myths, followed by a troop of children who had gone about with us and had giggled at the broken idols, pulled their beards, slapped their broken faces and kicked the fragments about. They now have no reverence for the idols and they know of nothing better. What a responsibility the Christian church is facing in China!

On the way home we visited a Christian home, and I was glad that Miss Deahl had a chance to see this beautiful home, for her introduction to China. has been mainly to poverty and sorrow of every kind.

N the fall of 1903, at the time of the

In the revolutionary troubles in

northern Macedonia, practically the entire population of the village of Belitsa were forced to flee from their burning homes and escape as best they could the pursuing bullets of the Turks. Naturally they turned northward and trudged for three weary days up through the mountain passes of the Rilo Range, till worn with fatigue and hunger, and chilled by the early snows, they found refuge, some sixteen hundred in number, in the hospitable city of Samokov in free Bulgaria. Here, between aid from city authorities and relief funds administered by missionary forces, they were fed, warmed and clothed, as most of them had fled with only the few articles they could hastily snatch up as they

ran.

There were the old and feeble among them, weakened by the hard trip, there were women and children, even new born babies, as well as strong men who must now eat the bread of idleness and dependence, as the season's work was over and spring's opening seemed far away. Belonging to this last class was the village schoolmaster, a man of slight education but of more than average intelligence, and he was loth to see the winter wasted for some of his boys.

Accordingly he appeared one day at the mission boarding school with two. boys of fourteen, and pled for their reception. They had only the clothes on their backs, and absolutely no funds for school fees, books, etc., but the principal was so much impressed by their eagerness to come that he agreed to be

personally responsible for their school expenses the first year. They were enrolled in the first class of the intermediate department, applied themselves eagerly to their studies and, at the same time, began to earn a little for themselves by printing and carpentry work in the Self-Help Department. By the end of the year their progress was such that the principal determined to keep them another year on the same terms, and so by means of friends interested in their story they were enabled to complete the seven years'

course.

Throughout it they were boys of exemplary conduct, and gradually identified themselves with all the organized movements for moral and social uplift in the school, such as the Y. M. C. A., the societies for temperance and moral purity, as well as the literary and musical associations. They were among the boys who could be relied upon and who, when difficult questions of discipline arose, would be found on the right side. Both were above the average in scholarship, while one of them, Nikola A., carried to the end of the course the highest marks ever given a student of the school. His fine mind and powers of assimilation made him a leader among the students, but his extreme simplicity and modesty of bearing saved him from the envious attacks which any superiority often causes among the students of the East.

After graduation in June, 1910, from this school-the Collegiate and Theological Institute of the American Board in Samokov-Nikola T. was called to