Once, during the wonderful day of deliverances that followed, the cry was raised by the mob that surrounded our carts:
"Get the nurse out, drag her out, we will have her!" And for a few terrible moments it seemed we would lose her, but God in His great mercy heard the cry that went up for her. A man came through the crowd, evidently one of some influence, and shouted: "Don't touch her, leave her alone; don't you see there are children and they need her?" So we were allowed to pass on.
In those terrible days that followed, when almost starved, when sickness came to first one and then another, when all were exhausted and tried to the lost point of endurance, Mrs. Cheng thought not for one moment of herself, but only for those she served. During all those hard, hard days not a word of complaint or of her own sufferings escaped her.
Almost a month from the time we left our home we reached Shanghai and here we had to part with our faithful helper. It was arranged that Mrs. Cheng should go to a friend of ours in Chefoo till the troubles were over, and we return to the Homeland.
Last words of farewell were being said at Mrs. Cheng's cabin door, as her steamer was about to leave. The dear woman clung to me unwilling to part and her last words were:
"Oh, my Shepherd Mother, do take good care of the children!" So smiles were mixed with tears as we parted.
* * *
Two years passed. Conditions were once more becoming normal, or nearly so. Missionaries were returning to their various stations, but could we, who had been through that Baptism of Blood, ever be just the same as before? We had been spared for further service, while others had been TRANSLATED. Surely we had been saved to serve as never before. A new and difficult life was entered upon—the opening of new out-stations, the breaking of new ground. All through the years of that life when traveling constantly from place to place, Mrs. Cheng was a patient and willing sharer in all the hardness and a never failing source of comfort to me. Never once in all those years, that I can recall, did this woman ever get really angry or even out of temper with the children, and it was a life that tried temper and patience to the utmost.
The years have passed on and with them the little children from our care, but Mrs. Cheng remains. Although sixty years of age she appears in some things to be renewing her youth! During the recent war, when we women were trying to do our "bit" through the Red Cross, Mrs. Cheng came to me one day and begged me to allow her to take my place at the sewing machine. At first I refused, but finally let her try but with some fear lest she break the needle. To my great surprise she was soon able to go on with the Red Cross work quite alone; indeed she came to make the soldiers' garments so well as to call forth special praise from the Red Cross Headquarters. This greatly surprised me, for I could never get her to attempt to learn the machine when the children were small. One day I asked her why this was so, and her reply was:
"Then I could not learn because the children filled my heart, now, my Shepherd Mother, it is empty!"