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Show American Board Mission, Lintsing, Shantung, China. Jan. 23. J934 Dear Friends, How I did wish for another film for my kodak yesterday when we were coming home from Fu Jen Chai. We might even have taken a movie tho the motion was mostly in-sudden jerks up and down and sideways and only very slowly forward,-it took us seven and a half hours to go eighteen miles! I am sure it would have been an interesting picture. There were three big carts, with two wheels and two oxen apiece, one ox hitched in front of the other. The front ox does most of the pulling and the back one takes the weight of the front of the cart. The carts were piled high with boxes of books, clothes, and dishes and then all sorts of things, our kettle and steamer for our bread, our acetylene generator for our lantern projector, the bellows for our cook stove, big bundles of leaves to feed the beasts, and tied on behind were our lanterns, three tin stoves, the two-inch stove-pipe for them and two five gallon kerosene cans with what kerosene we had left and it was considerably less after eighteen miles of splashing. On the front cart was the teacher from the primary school, the commander of the local Home Guards, two passengers and the two drivers. Each cart had two drivers, one for each cow when we had to turn sharp corners. The second cart had the book boxes so Mr. Chao rode atop in state, somehow reminding me of a man on a camel. On our cart, the four of us women folks perched on top of the bedding rolls wrapped in quilts and blankets till we looked like bundles ourselves for we had on too many clothes to walk. We had not gone far when the insides fell out of one of the stoves, then, a little farther on out of the other, later, we dropped a piece of stove pipe and just as we got into the edge of the city on one of the narrow busy streets, the whole front end of the second cart went up in the air and the awkward thing sat down on its tail and our little tin stove, and Mr. Chao was head down and toes pointing at the moon. The biggest thrill of all came just at dusk when we went to turn a corner on the edge of the river bank. The corner was narrow and sharp, the cart long and rigid, the road icy from drippings from the water cans where the carriers carry up water for the city, and the icy river about twenty-five feet almost straight below us, so, if the cows should slip, we, trunks, bellows* book boxes and bundles would skid straight into the muddy water, frozen over but not thick enough to hold the weight. We hit the old mill stone on the corner and had to back up and try again, the beasts skidded and then made it and we started to breathe again and dream of a warm bath at our journey's end. We unloaded our carts by moonlight, carried in the things that might freeze, left the men to arrange for supper and lodging for the carters and went home to supper. I shed my twenty-seven articles of clothing, including three sweaters, two pairs of padded trousers and a fur-lined coat and had had a bath almost as soon as Miss Lee and Miss Huong were ready. Never did carrots and spinach taste better for we had had no lunch since our breakfast of millet gruel and steamed bread and it was then seven-thirty. I chuckled to myself when I thought of the fuss I had sometimes made when a street car was ten minutes late! As I mentioned before, we were on our way back from Fu Jen Chai. The name means literally "Strong Man's Castle" though the town doesn't even have a wall around it as most of the villages • in that section have. It is eighteen miles straight south of here and is a town of perhaps two thousand people. It is the third place that I have been to work under our scheme |