to sweep before his own door." "When the scourge visited Canton it killed about 70,000 of the Chinese population. In the middle of the City of Canton there is an English settlement, and not a case occurred there. Here was a little community within a ring of death, but they were never touched. Why? The settlement had good sanitation, perfect cleanliness-the conditions which secure public health. Again, none of the European doctors caught the plague."

OUR RAINBOW LAND.

A BLACKBOARD ETCHING.

"The Bible claims a place, for the superiority both of its literary qualities and of its teachings. If studied merely from a literary standpoint, it contains the choicest matter, the best laws and profoundest mysterious that were ever penned. It describes the most ancient antiquities and strange events, wonderful occurrences, heroic deeds, unparalleled wars—and all this in the purest English, and through a phraseology always simple and condensed. It teaches the best rhetorician and exercises the wisest critic." And all this is one reason, but not the best, why our children here (3 classes) use daily the "Word of Life" for one reading lesson. It is also used for dictation. The "watchword" with its date is written on the board every morning. "Line upon line precept upon precept here a little and there a good deal.”

I suppose we are all willing to admit that a child who can read, write and make himself understood in two languages is apt to be more wide awake, to be cleverer than the child who can speak only his mother tongue. In this school there are now many who can, easily, make themselves understood in three. Little Chinese "Dorcas" who is but seventeen months in Makapala said to me yesterday some English words of two syllables more distinctly than any baby I ever heard. She comes to church twice every Sunday and takes care of herself walking in her little bare feet about the church peeping in at the different pews. Another baby not of two years by four months, holds his hymn-book and sings "Amen" to the top of his voice with the children. He shoots out in roundest English: "Papa over there!" (Rev. W. Yee Bew)

and then he gives a merry laugh thinking doubtless that he has double-folded his dear parent that time. Oh yes, little "Jacob" is all there, in "St. Paul's Church." The Chinese children laugh oftener (not smile) and learn to sing more easily than any I have known. They are not nervous and never irritable nor peevish— happy with little, obedient, industrious and supremely content. They are the children of the poor but they make not only their own clothing, and help to grow their own food, but they make their own playthings or go without. And if you fancy they cannot sew and darn and mend!

Chinese child and cleverness are synonymous terms.

And they every one drink plain tea!

It is a fairly-well equipped school-room long and narrow, with enough doors and windows for Hawaii even, all thrown up and swung wide open that every passing breeze may enter, and the dancing flickering lights and shadows may play upon its walls and floor. It is never closed by night nor by day. Within these precincts is a church and a church-yard always open for daily use, this school-house with its passion-vine-shaded veranda fresh, neat, cool and sweet-and the "home of the English-speaking teachera lady. The whole place is fenced, well-treed and grassed, excluded, quiet and pretty in this large village, sparcely populated with natives and Chinese.

Into this school comes trooping day by day promptly, gladly forty-three boys and girls, big and little of ages ranging from four years to sixteen. It is as you can see an ungraded country school, but not precisely a school of the character neither the nationality with which you, my reader, are likely well-informed. No. It is quite "as different as black and white," or to speak nearer to the point, as brown and yellow with white mayhap, one generation back!

There are children of Chinese parents; children who can boast, if they choose to do so, of a native mother and a Chinese father; of a half-white mother and Chinese father; of a native mother, but a Chinese step-mother, a heathen at that and who proved a very "tug-of-war" to the poor half Chinese half native maiden of sixteen summers! She was forbidden to come to church-to be confirmed. Why did they permit her to attend the school where there was, daily, most pronounced religious instruction? We cannot exactly sound the depths of the Chinese Empire. Possibly there was with them a latent spark of faith in the methods and manners of that Chinese and that American teacher, or in both. At-all-rates come to school she did and brought others (3) of the family, including a most lovely and coveted half-caste girl of four years (half white, half Japanese) that the heathen Chinese stepmother had bought for $50 in Honolulu, the summer previous to our advent into the Mission. There is one boy with as regular features, as fair a countenance as any pure Castilian that ever doffed a sombrero, or bent the knee to a "Dona Blanca;" but, with the queue of brown hair (Shades of Castile and Leon!) hanging full length down his back. His mother is Spanish (probably a Mexican).

By what strange mischance of circumstances she had, when a girl, married this Chinaman, drifted to this Makapala-by-the-sea and become the mother of his three boys and one pretty-faced, Spanish-looking girl of 12 years is far beyond our mental arithmetic or "philosophy."

There are too a few full natives in the school but every pupil is learning to read and to write in Chinese and gathering English week by week.

Now, in through the open front door of this school-house stumbled and shambled one morning a most shy, uncouth-looking girl of 12 years. She was wild in the true sense of the word-from

out the wilderness of hard fare and harder knocks of many kinds and forms a little wild girl. She was so timid and frightened of the school of the teachers; and one, a tall, white woman with blue eyes! She pushed her head forward, and crooked her elbows, when spoken to or looked at, like a hen when it is chased and raises its wings to run; she shivered and stammered over her native tongue, and twisted her naked, travel-stained, bony feet one over the other, and wrung her fingers in and out, hopelessly. And we did, what? We studied that poor child as we would study a beautiful landscape, a sunset, a glorious sunrising fresh from our Father's Hand. Here, was a new work-here was a creation, here, was a blank sheet on which we might write fairest English if we would.

Do you fancy we cared for, for that very plain, ugly face, that chopped hair, that skin which looked as if the pores never received full and free ablution-absolution, from dirt and grime; that awkward, stooping frame, that roughest garb of shirt (Sam) and trouser (fu) and nothing fresh, at that? No. That poor girl has never known-has never "guessed," from any turn of our eye, from any slightest movement of a muscle even, that we did not know her to be as fine as if decked out in silver sheen, with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. And let me say here that the Chinese, when able to buy, are very fond of jewelry, and rich and costly. Some of their hair pins are pure as gold of Ophir or of Guinea, and of exquisite workmanship; and their armlets are, often, superb. For some days we gave this “awkward squad" plenty of lee-way-time to take in the situation:-that she had come to school and must find out, if she could, with her poor, untrained, dull faculties what it was like. We gave her a seat and let her alone until she could get her breath. The first very perceptible change we noticed was after some time-that her skin looking much fairer; then, suddenly, she had changed her coiffeur;