church lawyers at home will crucify me for it. If I die, they'll condone my action, praise me in public, and scarify me in private. But neither their praise nor their blame can touch me then."

"The church lawyers be hanged, hanged in their own red tape!" exclaimed Sinclair savagely. "They have never seen anything but their own little parishes, and they think their tuppenny parochial rules can be applied to the whole world."

"I know, Dr. Sinclair, I know. What saith the Scripture? 'Where there is no vision the people perish.' But I am resolved that my people shall not perish. Leng-a," he said in Chinese to the student nurse, call A Hoa and Tan He to come here. Call all the other preachers, the students and elders to come at once.”

66

In a few minutes the room was full of native Christians, while others stood in the hall on one side, or out on the verandah on the other. Briefly and impressively MacKay explained to them the need and his resolve, charged the two preachers to accept the holy office, asked them the prescribed questions, and then, when they had knelt beside his bed, he laid a hand upon the head of each and reverently, solemnly said in Chinese,

"In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the only King and Head of the Church, and by the authority He has given me when He committed to me the care of these His people, I invite you to take part of this ministry with me, and commit to your care these my children in the Lord."

Tears glistened on the faces of the natives. Sobs broke from many of them. But the sick man continued resolutely, now in English,

"Dr. Sinclair, I have written to the Foreign Mission Committee of our Church, asking them to appoint you a medical missionary in North Formosa. That is your desire?"

"It is."

"If they grant my request-I do not say that they will-but if they do, do you promise to stay with these people as long as you may find it possible so to do, to heal their souls as well as their bodies, and to give these native brethren your counsel, according as the Lord gives you wisdom?"

"I do."

"I am content."

With the benediction the Chinese softly withdrew. The sick man fell back exhausted on the pillows, soon to be tossing and raving in delirium again. But over in the little college building the native Christians, led by their two new-made pastors, bowed themselves continuously in prayer for the life which was more than any other life to them.

Was it in answer to those prayers that ice was unexpectedly brought into that port in that tropic clime? Who knows? So many things are veiled from our eyes! But certain it is that when the ice was heaped about his fevered head, MacKay fell into a sweet, childlike sleep, from which he did not awake for thirty-six hours. And when he awoke he was

saved.

A few days later, under compulsion from the three doctors, he sailed on board the Fokien to join his family in Hong-Kong and rest. The day afterwards the French admiral declared a blockade, and Formosa was sealed against the world.

F

XXXIV

THE SOLDIER OF THE LEGION

OR the five months from October till March
Dr. Sinclair and Sergeant Gorman were with

the Chinese forces before Keelung. For those five months rain fell almost continuously. Clouds drifted in from the sea, trailed through the valleys, and crept up the mountain sides, discharging their burdens of water as they went. The earth was sodden under foot. Walls and roofs sweated moisture. Tents and clothing mildewed. Food moulded and rotted in the constant wet. Scarcely ever a gleam of sunshine broke through the leaden canopy of cloud to cleanse the reeking earth and atmosphere. For one period of forty-five days the rain never ceased for an hour.

All through the wretched winter French transports arrived bringing reinforcements, and left again carrying sick and wounded men. All through the winter a succession of petty conflicts took place, a series of harassing, ineffectual actions was fought. A French column would issue from Keelung, plunge through roads which were nought but channels of liquid mud, struggle up dripping heights, through the tall grasses and ferns and brush, exposed to the fire of concealed sharp-shooters, and drive the enemy from the top at the point of the bayonet, only to find that their labour and the price of blood paid was all in vain. In some cases the small forces they were able to spare could

not hold the heights against the rallying Chinese. In others immediately behind they discovered higher and more strongly fortified posts dominating those that they had captured.

All the while the French cemetery on the east side of the harbour, which they had named La Galissonnière, was growing more and more populous at an alarming rate. Typhoid fever, malarial fever, cholera were far more dangerous than the bullets and knives of the Chinese. In spite of the numbers of sick and wounded men sent home to France, by the time the winter had passed into summer seven hundred of the small force employed had been laid away in the rain-soaked, wave-beaten beach at Keelung.

Meanwhile still heavier losses were suffered by the Chinese. The superior discipline and arms of the French more than compensated for their inferiority in numbers, and enabled them to work havoc in the close-set ranks of the Chinese. The little hospital at Loan-Loan was always filled with wounded. Sometimes they overflowed into the neighbouring houses requisitioned by the military authorities for the purpose.

Among these wounded men Sinclair and Gorman worked almost day and night. When a battle was in progress, one or other went out with the ambulance corps, gave the wounded first aid on the field, and forwarded them to the hospital for fuller treatment there. Under leaden skies and the incessant downpour of rain, with insufficient medicines and equipment, and subsisting on poor native food, they worked on week after week, month after month.

Perhaps what was hardest to bear was the fact that during all those months not a word reached them

from the outside world. The blockade had effectually

excluded all mails. family in Amoy. Hong-Kong.

Gorman heard nothing from his
Sinclair had never a line from

"Bedad," said Gorman one day, "this is a time when a man would be glad to be afther seein' the shape of a letter, even if it were only from his motherin-law."

“Let me have a look at your tongue, and a feel of your pulse, Gorman!" exclaimed Sinclair, reaching for the sergeant's wrist. "I knew that you were in a bad way. But I had no idea that you were so far gone as that."

"Och, docther, but wudn't I show you the iligances of an Irish jig, if the ould lady wud only write to me that she was dead an' p'acefully departed. Then I cud go home to me wife an' childer."

It was a time when men were tested. Daily, hourly, Sinclair thought of the girl he loved, spending the winter in Hong-Kong, subject to the attentions and solicitations of the now titled Carteret, and the pressure brought to bear by her mother. His hands would clench and his jaws set hard. But he was sure that Jessie MacAllister would do her part. Over and over again her farewell words kept running through his mind, "I'll be thinking of you, Donald, and you'll be thinking of me."

The longest and dreariest months will always come to an end. When February had passed, the skies began to clear sometimes. The first week of March. had some beautiful days.

With this came renewed activity on the part of the French. In a series of actions lasting five days, March 3d to 7th, they succeeded in capturing some of the