His steadfastness and perseverance won for him from the Africans the name, "Tree-Not-Shaken-by-the-Wind."
Frequently the boys themselves become missionaries. They build churches and tell the people the wonderful story of the "Tribe of God" to which they belong. Many of them start schools. None of them sit around their huts all day and smoke and drink and beat their wives and quarrel, as their fathers and grandfathers used to do. While they learn their trades, they become better Christians, not only because they listen to the preaching on Sunday, but because they watch Mr. and Mrs. Hope and the other missionaries and see how they live.
Fred Hope said he would be a missionary if he could be one without being a preacher, yet he preaches every day. Sometimes he ventures to stand up in church or among the people who crowd the doors of the mission, and tell them the story of the Son of God who gave Himself for them, but most of his preaching is his every-day living.
He has won his "drum name." He began to win it when he paid his pledge for $1.00 by catching rats when his bean crop failed, and always since then he has found some way to do the things that he undertakes no matter how hard they are or how many difficulties he meets.
If you were in an African village which Mr. Hope was about to visit, you would not be handed a telegram stating "Fred Hope has arrived," but instead, you would hear the drums beat the call, "'Tree-Not-Shaken-by-the-Wind' is here."
V
WHEN MARY WAS AFRAID
The night was gloomy and rain threatened, yet there were many boys and girls on Queen Street in Dundee. They were doing nothing in particular; they did not seem to be on their way anywhere; they were simply hanging about.
Opening into Queen Street were courts called "pends" or "closes." These were not streets, for they were very narrow, or thoroughfares, because they led nowhere; they were merely vestibules to tall buildings where human beings lived huddled together like animals. They were paved with rough stones, and in order to reach the spiral staircase on the outside of the old tenements one had to step through masses of filth.