We were running down the Samabs River in a small Dutch ship, the Merkeus. This river, running almost parallel to the Equator, and not more than fifty miles away from that well-known institution, cuts the western end of Borneo in two, and lends phenomenal fertility to its soil.

Shooting around a bend in the river, suddenly there loomed on the western shores, so close that we could throw a stone and hit it, a tree that was leafless, dead as a volcanic dump; but its dead branches literally swarmed with monkeys. The light in the west had so far gone that they appeared as silent silhouettes against the sunset Their tails, which seemed to be about three feet long, and were curled at the ends, hung below the dead branches. One big fellow had perched himself on the tiptop of the tree, and in the dim light he looked like a human sentinel as his black outline appeared against the evening light.

Then came Missionary Worthington's story about Kin Thung, the boy who, with characteristic Oriental spirit, had quick murder in his heart:

"It was while I was the head of the Boys' School down in Batavia, Java, that it happened. One has experiences out here in dealing with youth that he does not get at home, for it is inflammable material, explosive to the highest degree."

I waited for his story to continue as the Dutch ship glided swiftly down the river toward the South China Sea, and night settled over us as we sat there on the upper deck, watching the crimson glory change into sudden purple.

"I heard a noise and I knew there was a fight on in the dormitory. I had seen the aftermath of such Malay and Chinese feuds in our schools before, and I knew that it was no trivial matter, as it often is with boy fights at home, so I hurried up.

"When I got there I saw Kin Thung wiping his knife, and the boy he had been fighting lying on the floor, bleeding from a long wound."

"What had happened?"

"Kin Thung was a quick-tempered boy. In addition to that, he was of a sullen make-up, with, what I call, a criminal tendency in him. That, added to his already volatile spirit, made him a real problem in the school. For instance, he was the kind of a boy who, if a teacher called on him without warning to recite, he would get uncontrollably angry, turn sullen and refuse to answer."

"Why didn't you fire him?" I said.

"That would have been the easy thing to do. I preferred to win him rather than to fire him!"

I felt ashamed of myself for my suggestion, and looked out into the night skies where the beautiful form of the southern cross loomed in the zenith.

"No, I didn't fire him."

"What did you do?"

"As I was dressing the boy's wound Kin Thung stood looking on, utterly expressionless and unrepentant, even sullen.

"I didn't say anything to Kin that night, save to ask him to come to the office the next day.

"The other boys were calling out to him as he entered, and I could hear them through the window, 'I wonder how many strokes of the rattan he will get?' for that is one of our forms of punishment.

"He was no doubt wondering himself when he entered, still sullen.

"I said to him, 'Kin, I could give you as punishment a hundred strokes of the rattan. I could put you on rice and water for a month, or I could put you to a room for a week in solitary confinement. But I am not going to do either or any of them. I am going to pray for you!"

"'I don't want you to, sir!' he cried in alarm.

"'Kneel down!' I said to him.

"'I don't want to.'

"'Kneel down, I say!'

"'I won't!'

"'But this is your punishment. You would submit to the rattan if I imposed that. You must submit to this!' I said.

"'I hate prayer!'

"'Kneel down, boy!'

"He knelt. I prayed. He wept."

This was the cryptic way the missionary came to the climax of his story. Again the Southern Cross shot into view as we turned a curve in the river.

"The fountain broke. A boy's heart was won! I didn't have to fire him. I won him!"

"That lad came to me two years later as he started out from our school in Batavia, and said, 'Mr. Worthington, that moment when you called me into your office was the crucial moment of my life. If you had been unkind to me then; if you had punished me, even as much as I deserved it; if you had not been Christ-like, I should have killed you. I had my knife ready. There was a demon in me! Your kindness, your praying for me, broke something inside of me. I guess it was my heart. I cried. I prayed. That morning saved my soul!'"

"That was a marvelous experience, Mr. Missionary! It was a marvelous way to meet the situation," I said in a low tone, looking up at the white outline of the Southern Cross, and remembering two thieves.

"It was Christ's way!" said the missionary.

But perhaps the outstanding Flash-light of national Friendship is that of America for the Philippines. I shall never forget the day we started southward from winter-bound China for sun-warmed Manila.

As the great ship swung about in the muddy waters of the Yangsti and turned southward, the bitter winds of winter were blowing across her deserted decks. But in two days one felt not only a breath of warm tropical winds on his face but he also felt a breath of warmer friendship blowing into his soul as he thought of the Philippines and America.

The first breath of warm winds from southern tropical seas gently kissed one's cheeks that afternoon. It was a soothing breath of romance, freighted with the scent of tropical trees. It was much of a contrast with the bitter winter winds that had blown the day before at Shanghai. There the snow was flying, and woolen suits were greatly needed.But to-night men and women alike walk the decks of this Manila-bound ship. They are all in white. One stands at the bow of the ship, glad to catch the salt spray on tanned cheeks, glad to feel the sea-touched winds playing with his hair, glad to see fair women of the Orient tanned with summer suns; for it is summer in the Philippines, while winter reigns in China and the rest of the Oriental lands further north.

Last night we passed the narrow straits leading out of Shanghai harbor directly south. Two lighthouses blinked through the dusk of evening, the one to the north in short sharp notes, like a musician of the sea singing coasts, rapidly beating time. The light to the south seemed to count four in blinks and then hold its last count like a note of music. In between the two lighthouses vague, dim, mist-belted mountains of the China coast loomed through the dusk.

This morning and all day long we have been sailing past the huge outlines of mountainous Formosa, that rich island off the coast of China, between Shanghai and Manila. It looks like some fairly island with its coves and caves, into which pours the purple sea, visible through the faint mists of morning and noontime. Its precipitous sides shoot down to the sea in great bare cliffs, save where, here and there, a beautiful bay runs in from the southern sea to kiss the green lips of the land.

But now the sun is setting. I am watching it from my stateroom window.

******

And now it is the rainy season in the Philippines.

It doesn't rain in Luzon; it opens up clouds, and oceans suddenly drop to the land. Lakes and rivers form overnight. Bridges wash out, fields are inundated, houses by thousands are swept away, and railroad tracks twisted and played with, as if they were grappled by gigantic fists.

Men will tell you of the great Typhoon that suddenly dropped out of the mountains at Baguio, sliced off a few sections of the mountains, rushed down through the great gorge, and left in its trail the iron ruins of eight or ten bridges, put in by American engineers, founded on solid granite; but swept away like playthings of wood, in an hour.

One night we were driving from Baguio to Manila.

A storm dropped suddenly out of the nowhere. We had no side curtains on, and in just three minutes we were soaked to the skin, and dripping streams of water. The artesian wells along the way were but dribbling springs compared with us.

The storm came out of a clear, star-lit sky. Storms come that way in the Philippines. Only a few minutes before I had been looking up at the Southern Cross admiring its beauty. I looked again and there was no Southern Cross. A few great drops of rain fell and then came the deluge.

Candle lights flickered in innumerable thatched houses where brown and naked women fluttered about dodging the rain, looking strangely like great paintings in the night. At the edge of each side porch a Bamboo ladder reached up from the ground. A fire burned against the rain. This fire leapt up for two feet.

One could easily imagine on this stormy night, with every road a river, every field a flood, and every vacant space a sea, that the thatched houses raised on Bamboo poles were boats, afloat in a great ocean. The fires on the back porches looked for all the world like the fires that I have seen flaring against the night from Japanese fishing boats.

We had been warm, personal friends since college days, this driver and I. He had chosen the harder way of the mission fields to spend his life.

"After all," said he, "that was a dream worth dreaming!""What do you mean?" I asked him, a bit startled.

"Why the American occupation of these islands; the dream that McKinley had, of teaching them to govern themselves; and then giving them their independence; an Imperial Dream such as the world never heard of before; a dream that, if it has done nothing else, has won for America the undying friendship of the intelligent Filipino."

"Right you are, man! But why such a thought at this ungodly hour? I should think rather that you would be sending out an S. O. S."

"Dunno! Just flashed over me that that was a dream worth dreaming; and, by gad, boy, we're seeing it come to pass. Look at those contented people living in peace and security; their home fires lighted; their children in school; plenty to eat; not afraid that to-morrow morning some Friar will sell their home from under them. No wonder they have given their undying friendship to America!"

He continued as we sped through the rain.

"England and Germany sneered at America's dream. Such a dream of friendship through serving its colony had never been born in any other national soul from the Genesis of colonization up to this day, save in the soul of America in the Philippines. We have set the ideals of the world in many ways but never in a more marked way than this.

"The Phoenicians were the first colonizers and they swept the Mediterranean with a policy of exploitation and slavery which was selfish and sordid. Then came Greece which had some such ideal of colonization as America. Her ideal was, that colonies, like fruit from a tree, when ripe, should fall off of the mother tree. Or the ideal of Greece was that colonizing should come about like the swarming of bees."

I nodded my head. He went on as we slashed through the muddy ways, "Rome with her Imperial dream, her army to back it up, failed as have failed both Germany and Japan; three nations with kindred ideals as to colonization.

"Venice was cruel, adventurous and rapacious in her colonizing policy on the Black Sea and she left a record of exploitations which makes a black blotch on the world's pages.

"Modern colonization began with Spain in South America, Mexico and the Philippines. Spain has nothing over which to boast in that record. The Dutch in Java, the record of Belgium in the Congo; that of the Portuguese in the Far East; the French in Africa; the English in India; Germany in China and Africa, and Japan in Korea, have not been entirely for the service of the subjected people, for all of these Governments have gone on the fundamental theory that the colony exists for the Mother States."

He paused a moment as we made a cautious way around a big caribou. "Then came the great dream of America that the Mother State exists for the benefit of the colony.

"Elihu Root said, 'We have declared a trust for the benefit of the people of the Philippine Islands!'

"President William McKinley said: The government is designed not for exploitation nor for our own satisfaction, or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for the happiness, peace and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands.'

"Ex-President Taft said when he was Governor-General of the Islands: The chief difference between the English policy and treatment of tropical peoples and ours, arises from the fact that we are seeking to prepare them under our guidance for popular self-government. We are attempting to do this, first by primary and secondary education offered freely to the Filipino people.'

"This spirit has won the undying friendship of the Filipino people. True enough, they will finally want their independence. That is natural, but there is a deep love for America buried in their hearts because America has been square with them; has fulfilled her promises; has not exploited them, but has served them. That is why I call the colonization policy of America here in the Philippines a dream worth dreaming." My friend was right.

"We love America, because America is our friend!" said a humble fisherman to me one day on the banks of the Pasig.

"Yes, the United States; it is our own! You are our brothers!" said a Filipino boy who had been educated in a Mission school.

"We are no longer our own. We belong to America. You have bought us with a price! It cost the blood of American soldiers to buy us!" said an old Filipino, gray with years, but high in the councils of the Government.

******

One night on the Lunetta the Filipino Band was playing. It was a beautiful evening with a sunset that lifted one into the very skies with its bewildering glory and ecstasy. I had been sitting there, drinking in the beautiful music made by the world-famous Constabulary Band, and watching the quicksilver-like changing colors of the sunset. Then the band started to play "The Star Spangled Banner." I was so lost in the sunset and the music that I did not notice.

I heard a sudden stirring. Brown bodies, half-naked Filipinos all about me, had leapt to their feet at the playing of our national hymn. Beautiful Filipino women in their dainty and delicately winged gowns, bare brown shoulders heaving with pride and friendship, stood reverently. Filipino soldiers all over the Lunetta stood at attention facing the flag, the Stars and Stripes waving in the winds from the old walled city. Side by side with American soldiers who had just returned from Siberia stood Filipino Constabulary soldiers. Side by side with well-dressed American children stood half-naked Filipino children at reverent attention, paying a wholesome respect to the Stars and Stripes as the old hymn swept across the Lunetta.

"That is a thrilling thing to see!" I said to a friend.

"It could not have happened ten years ago! M he replied.

"Why?"

"They did not trust us, and they did not love us. They had seen too much of the selfish colonization policies of Spain. They expected the same things from America. It did not come. They have been won to us!"

This warm-hearted friendship is not true either of England's colonies anywhere in the Orient or of Japan's in Formosa or Korea. It is true alone in the Philippines.

******While I was in the Philippines, down in San Fernando, a statue was erected to a well-known rebel. He was a man who had refused to take the oath of allegiance to America when we captured the islands. He escaped and carried on a propaganda against us. But when he died and a request was made that a statue be erected to his memory, the United States granted this permission.

At the dedication of this statue the Governor of this Province said that he doubted if any nation on the face of the earth, save the United States, would have permitted the erection of such a statue to a rebel against that government. "That act will bind our hearts closer to the heart of the United States!" he said in closing his address. The thrilling thing about it all was, that his address was met with prolonged cheering on the part of the thousands of Filipinos who had gathered for the dedication.

Another evidence of this beautiful friendship for America is the painting which adorns the walls of one of the Government buildings in Manila. It is called "The Welcome to America." It was purchased, paid for and erected by Filipinos; erected in good will, with laughter in their souls, and joy in their hearts.

It was painted by Hidalgo in Paris in 1904.

High colors; reds, browns, yellows, golds, blues, purples; tell its story. It adorns the panel at the end of the Senate Chamber of the Filipino Government.

It has spirit in it and a great, deep sincerity.

The central figure is a beautiful woman, symbolic of America. She comes across the Pacific carrying the gifts of peace, prosperity, security and love to her colony, the Philippines.

She carries in one hand the American flag. At her side is Youth bearing a Harp, symbol of the music that America brings into the souls of the people whom she comes to serve. Singing angels hover about the scene.

Above the central figure of America, on angel wings, is a Youth carrying a lighted torch. To the left is a beautiful brown-skinned Filipino woman with eyes uplifted to this torch. She bears within her ample bosom the children of the islands. The torch is symbol of the fact that we are handing on the light of our Christian civilization to the children of our colonies.

I visited this painting many times, but I never visited it that I did not see many Filipinos, both young and old, standing before it, with reverent eyes.

I said to a high official of the Government, "Does that painting represent the way you Filipinos feel to-day?""Hidalgo has spoken for us. He has voiced our feelings well!" was the reply.

******

This friendship for the United States is a thrilling thing found all over the Far East. One finds it in Korea, as well as in the Philippines, like a burning light of glory. Korea says, "America is our only hope! We have always trusted and loved America!"

One finds it like a silver stream running through the life of China. Dr. Sun Yat Sen said to me in Shanghai: "America has always been China's staunch friend! America we trust! America we love! America is our hope! America is our model!"

Mr. Tang Shao-yi said, "America's hands and those of America alone are clean in her relations with China. This cannot be said of the other nations."

Then he told me a thrilling story of the Boxer Rebellion. He, with two thousand Chinese, who were Government officials, were barricaded in a compound behind the usual Chinese walls. The Boxers were firing on them every day. They had run out of food. In fact, they were starving.

But one morning a bright-faced American boy appeared at the gates of the wall. He was admitted because he was an American. He asked to be taken to Mr. Tang Shao-yi."What do you most need?" this young American asked the rich Chinese merchant.

"We most need food," was the reply.

"All right, I'll get enough for you to-day!" said the young American.

"That night," said Mr. Tang Shao-yi, "that American boy returned with five hundred hams which the Boxers had thrown away, in addition to a thousand sacks of flour which he had gotten from the English legation."

"Wonderful!" I exclaimed.

"And that boyish American was——"

"Who?" I asked with tense interest, for the old man was smiling with a suggestive Oriental smile, as if he had a climax up his commodious sleeves.

"That man was Herbert Hoover!"

And from that interview henceforth and forever no human being need tell me that the Chinese have no sense of the dramatic.

"That's why we love and trust America," said this great Chinese statesman. "It is because America has always been our friend in time of need!"

I found this friendship for the United States true all over the Oriental world. It was to me a great miracle of national friendship. The peoples of the Orient trust us. They are not suspicious of our intentions in spite of what jingo papers say. We have won their hearts. We have claimed their friendship.

The name "America," which stands in the Oriental mind for the United States, is a sacred passport and password. It is a magical word. It opens doors that are locked to all the rest of the world; it tears down barriers, century-old, that have been barricading certain places for ages past. That simple word opens hearts that would open with none other.

The eyes of the brown men of the Far East open wide at that word, and a new light appears in them. This is particularly true in Korea, in China, in the Malacca Straits, and in the Philippines.

It is enough to bring a flood of tears to the heart of an American, lonely for a sight of his own flag, homesick for his native shores, to see and feel and hear and know the pulse of this friendship for our country among millions of brown men.

"It is because we are like you, we Chinese," said Tang Shao-yi. "It is because we are both Democrats at heart!"

"It is because you have been our true friends!" said Dr. Sun Yat Sen.

"It is because your ideals are our ideals; your dreams our dreams and your friends our friends," said Wu Ting-fang, one of China's greatest leaders, to me.

"It is because so many of our young men have been trained in your American schools, and because so many of us feel that the United States is our second home. It is because you have sent so many good men and women to China to help us; to teach us; to live with us; to love us; to serve us! It is because your missionaries from America have shown the real heart of the United States to us!" said Mr. Walter Busch, a Chinese American student who is now editor of the Peking Leader.

But whatever the cause, the glorious fact is enough to:

But perhaps the highest and holiest Flash-lights of Friendship that one finds in the Far East is that of the friendship formed by the American missionaries for the people among whom they are working, and the friendship that these people give in return. These are holy things.

The average missionary comes home on his furlough, but before he is home three months he is homesick to go back to his people. So they come and go across the seas of the world through the years, weaving like a great Shuttle of Service the fabric of friendship for themselves and for the United States.

This shuttle of service is being woven night and day across the Atlantic and across the Pacific by great ships bearing missionaries going and coming; furlough following furlough, after six years of service; term after term; leaving native land, children, memories; time after time until death ends that particular thread, crimson, gold, brown or white. The great Shuttle of Love weaves the fabric of friendship across the seas as the ships come and go, bearing outbound and homebound missionaries to foreign fields.

I am thinking particularly of the Pacific as I write this sketch sitting in a room overlooking the great harbor of Yokohama where three Japanese warship lie anchored and two great Pacific liners, one on its way to San Francisco and another bound for Vancouver. They come and go, these great ships. A few days ago the Empress of Asia made its twenty-eighth trip across and it soon will start on its twenty-eighth trip back to Vancouver again. Some of the ships out of San Francisco have made more than a hundred trips. So they weave the shuttle back and forward across this great sea. And never a ship sails this sea that it does not carry its passenger list of missionaries. Our list was more than half a hundred.

As Mr. Forman, in a sympathetic and appreciative article that he has written for the Ladies' Home Journal, says, the common phrase on a Pacific liner is, "There are two hundred and fifty passengers and forty-five missionaries on board." Every Pacific passenger list immediately divides itself into two groups, the missionaries and the other passengers.

Then Mr. Forman proceeds to slay those shallow, narrow-minded, often ignorant and uneducated tourists and business men who dare to speak of this traveling missionary with derision. Mr. Forman has no particular interest in missions and he has no particular interest in the Church, but he started out to investigate this derogatory phrase, "and forty-five missionaries."

Mr. Forman starts his article with these striking paragraphs

But Mr. Forman sees working that Shuttle of Service of which I am speaking. He sees, as any thinking man sees, as Roosevelt saw, as Bryan saw, and as Taft saw, that the greatest single influence for good in the Orient is the missionary. Mr. Forman was incensed at this careless phrase on the Pacific liners, and he investigated the work of our missionaries when he was in the Orient, and he came to the decision that they are worth more to America, even from that selfish standpoint, than all the ambassadors that we have sent over, because they are, in their crossing and recrossing, weaving a Fabric of Friendship between the Orient and the Occident; between the nations of the East and those of the West; between the white peoples and the brown peoples; in spite of the diplomatic differences and yellow newspapers in the United States and Japan.

Mr. Forman says about his conclusions:

And again in the same article he says:

And again he wonderfully sums up that mission of love in a paragraph which I think ought to be passed on:

I talked with one bright-faced, twinkling-eyed, red-blooded, big-framed missionary who was crossing with his family of a wife and four children. He had spent fifteen years in the Orient as a missionary, and then because of illness he had been compelled to go to America. There he had taken a church and had preached for five years. His health came back, and as he told me, "The lure of the East got me and I had to come back. I never was so happy in my life as I am on this trip and the whole family feels the same way. We are going back to our people!" And the way he pronounced those italicised words made me know that he, too, was weaving a thread in the Fabric of Friendship.

We met a woman who was traveling back to China with her three darling little tots. I made love to all three of them, and it wasn't long before I asked one where her Daddy was. I assumed, of course, that they had been home on a furlough and that Daddy was back there in China waiting anxiously for them to return to him. I pictured that meeting, for I have seen many such during war days, both on this side and in France.

"My Daddy is dead," the child said simply with a quiver of her little lips.

"All right, dear baby, we won't talk about it then," for I was afraid that those little trembling lips couldn't hold in much longer. But she wanted to tell me about it. I soon saw that. She liked to talk about her "dear dead Daddy."

"He went to France," she said simply.

"Ah, he was a soldier?" I questioned.

"No, he was better than a soldier, my Mamma says. He did not go to kill; he went to help." And back of that sentiment and that statement I saw a world of struggle and ideals in a missionary home where the man felt called across the seas to be "in it" with his country and at last the refuge of the man who could go "not to kill but to help."

"He went to work with the coolies and he got the influenza and died last winter. We won't have any Daddy any more," and her little blue eyes were misty with tears. And so were mine, more misty than I dared let her see. And they are misty now as I write about it. And yours will be misty if you read about it, as they should be. That is something fine in you being called out.

Later I met the mother. She told me over again the story that little Doris had told me of the big Daddy who had felt the call to go to France in the Y.M.C.A. to help the poor "coolies," several hundred of whom were, by strange coincidence, going back to China on the same boat with us, and with that brave mother and those dear children. These "coolies" were going back alive, but he who went to serve them died. "Others he saved; Himself he could not save," echoed in my soul as that mother and I talked.

"I am going back to the Chinese to spend the rest of my life finishing Will's work. It is better so. I shall be happier."

"But the association there—everything—every turn you make—every place you go—will remind you of him," I protested."It would be what Will would want most of all, that I go on with his work. I go gladly. It will be the best balm for my sorrow."

And far above national friendships there loom these snow-white peaks of the sacrificial friendship the missionaries bear in their hearts for the people with whom they live, and serve, and die.

THE END