"On the other side of the River was also a meadow, curiously beautified with lilies, and it was green all the year round."—Pilgrim's Progress.
CHAPTER IV
THE CONTINUATION OF THE STORY
Being a Record of some who were counted worthy to suffer for Christ's sake, and of Mrs. Hsi's Experiences in the Boxer Outbreak
CHANGES in the staff at Taiyüanfu released for the oversight of mission work in Hwochow, Jane Stevens and Mildred Clarke.
They might well shrink from the task facing them. Work in the provincial capital had been of so totally different an order, and life in a large community of foreigners had limited their sphere to the oversight of a small school for girls, and the instruction of women inquirers.
None had felt more strongly the seriousness of the step taken by Miss Jacobsen, and they came to Hwochow with the determination that all should early understand the impossibility of intercourse outside the most rigid observance of etiquette, Chinese and Western. Feeling strongly that such an attitude on their part would be the most helpful factor in the gathering around them of better-class women, they faithfully carried it into practice. Men who were connected with the Church were received by them only under the most formal restrictions. Finding it impossible to eat Chinese food, a simple, but foreign ménage, took the place of the hitherto free-and-easy conditions.
It was a severe test for Chinese and foreigners alike; desire for renewal of the former conditions of intimacy met with no encouragement from those who could not but constantly bear the past in mind, and who felt that, for the highest interests of the work, a new relationship must be established. This attitude was naturally regarded as aloofness, and was galling to those whose love had been set on the young missionaries fresh from Norway, with all the enthusiasm of youth, to whom they themselves had taught the language and who belonged to them as others could not.