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Show Lintsingchow, China, July 27 1912 My De ar Friends . Here it is summer time again and to most of you I have not written all the year, though I have had letters from not a few of you and in my heart have thanked you for writing, I hope you are all well and each, happy in his own work. In many respects this has been a good year in spite of the Revolution and our enforced exile in Tientsin, from which place I sent many of you copies of our station letter written at that time. Mr. Ellis was here in Lintsing all winter, and the other members of the station except Mr. and Mrs. Eastman and their small daughter returned from the north in time to escape the confusion and terror of the looting and burning in Tientsin. We were glad to be in the quiet interior and thankful to be able to take up our regular work again. We had a very busy spring. The four Ellises started on their furlough in June and Edith after seeing them off in Tientsin, went on to Pe i-T a i-Ho wher e she has since been studying hard. I am to join her there next week when our mission has its annual meeting. Of course one of the things that has made the year a happy one has been having my sister with me. She has kept well and has made good progress with the study of Chinese. She has already a large place in the hearts of the school-girls and women of the church. You will be glad to know that Dr. Ma Shih Chen, whom the Pang Chwang station is loaning us until our medical students finish, has come and promises to do good work. I am so thankful not to have to close the hospital when I go to mission meeting. Mr. Hou, one of our medical students, is conducting summer classes here for our men nurses and a few others. He has some hard work planned for them, and all is starting out well. We hope they may all receive spiritual uplift even more than mental training. From a number of you have come gifts for the poor and you would like to know how the money is being spent. A small volume would not be sufficient for recording the stories of all those you have helped. Some were beggers butmost were people we know personally, helpless old people, poor neighbours, day-school pupils, or needy sick in the hospital. One was a poor old woman who was dying of cancer. The kind-hearted nuns at a Buddist temple near by gave her a place to live and the food she ate was partly from you. Her last days were thus made easier than they might have been. One family you are helping is a lame widow and two little girls. The father, a working man, who earned enough to keep his family died of pneumonia after only a few days illness and left them with not even a roof over their heads. Their gratitude for the few dimes they have received from time to time (enough to pay their rent) is pathetic. Several times money has gone to get a few meals for the hungry little children of a man who used to be a helper but had to be discharged for dishonesty. One gift paid the workman who mended the leaky roof of an old blind woman's house. Another who is helped is one of our gate-keepers, a very valuable man in our work, who has tuberculosis. The cod-1iver-oi1 furnished him is doing much toward building up his body. His face is fuller and he coughs hardly at all . We begin to hope he may really be cured. A family |