The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Half Century Among the Siamese and the Lāo, by Daniel McGilvary

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A HALF CENTURY AMONG THE
SIAMESE AND THE LĀO

Daniel McGilvary

A HALF CENTURY AMONG

THE SIAMESE AND THE LĀO

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

By

DANIEL McGILVARY, D.D.

WITH AN APPRECIATION BY

ARTHUR J. BROWN, D.D.

ILLUSTRATED

New York Chicago Toronto

Fleming H. Revell Company

London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1912, by

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue

Chicago: 125 N. Wabash Ave.

Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W.

London: 21 Paternoster Square

Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

TO

MY WIFE

AN APPRECIATION

Missionary biography is one of the most interesting and instructive of studies. It is, however, a department of missionary literature to which Americans have not made proportionate contribution. The foreign missionary Societies of the United States now represent more missionaries and a larger expenditure than the European Societies, but most of the great missionary biographies are of British and Continental missionaries, so that many Americans do not realize that there are men connected with their own Societies whose lives have been characterized by eminent devotion and large achievement.

Because I regarded Dr. McGilvary as one of the great missionaries of the Church Universal, I urged him several years ago to write his autobiography. He was then over seventy-five years of age, and I told him that he could not spend his remaining strength to any better advantage to the cause he loved than in preparing such a volume. His life was not only one of unusual length (he lived to the ripe age of eighty-three), but his missionary service of fifty-three years covered an interesting part of the history of missionary work in Siam, and the entire history, thus far, of the mission to the Lāo people of northern Siam. There is no more fascinating story in fiction or in that truth which is stranger than fiction, than the story of his discovery of a village of strange speech near his station at Pechaburī, Siam, his learning the language of the villagers, his long journey with his friend, Dr. Jonathan Wilson, into what was then the unknown region of northern Siam, pushing his little boat up the great river and pausing not until he had gone six hundred miles northward and arrived at the city of Chiengmai. The years that followed were years of toil and privation, of loneliness and sometimes of danger; but the missionaries persevered with splendid faith and courage until the foundations of a prosperous Mission were laid.

In all the marked development of the Lāo Mission, Dr. McGilvary was a leader—the leader. He laid the foundations of medical work, introducing quinine and vaccination among a people scourged by malaria and smallpox, a work which has now developed into five hospitals and a leper asylum. He began educational work, which is now represented by eight boarding schools and twenty-two elementary schools, and is fast expanding into a college, a medical college, and a theological seminary. He was the evangelist who won the first converts, founded the first church, and had a prominent part in founding twenty other churches, and in developing a Lāo Christian Church of four thousand two hundred and five adult communicants. His colleague, the Rev. Dr. W. C. Dodd, says that Dr. McGilvary selected the sites for all the present stations of the Mission long before committees formally sanctioned the wisdom of his choice. He led the way into regions beyond and was the pioneer explorer into the French Lāo States, eastern Burma, and even up to the borders of China. Go where you will in northern Siam, or in many sections of the extra-Siamese Lāo States, you will find men and women to whom Dr. McGilvary first brought the Good News. He well deserves the name so frequently given him even in his lifetime—“The Apostle to the Lāo.”

It was my privilege to conduct our Board’s correspondence with Dr. McGilvary for more than a decade, and, in 1902, to visit him in his home and to journey with him through an extensive region. I have abiding and tender memories of those memorable days. He was a Christian gentleman of the highest type, a man of cultivation and refinement, of ability and scholarship, of broad vision and constructive leadership. His evangelistic zeal knew no bounds. A toilsome journey on elephants through the jungles brought me to a Saturday night with the weary ejaculation: “Now we can have a day of rest!” The next morning I slept late; but Dr. McGilvary did not; he spent an hour before breakfast in a neighbouring village, distributing tracts and inviting the people to come to a service at our camp at ten o’clock. It was an impressive service,—under a spreading bo tree, with the mighty forest about us, monkeys curiously peering through the tangled vines, the huge elephants browsing the bamboo tips behind us, and the wondering people sitting on the ground, while one of the missionaries told the deathless story of redeeming love. But Dr. McGilvary was not present. Seventy-four years old though he was, he had walked three miles under a scorching sun to another village and was preaching there, while Dr. Dodd conducted the service at our camp. And I said: “If that is the way Dr. McGilvary rests, what does he do when he works?” Dr. McKean, his associate of many years, writes:

“No one who has done country evangelistic work with Dr. McGilvary can ever forget the oft-seen picture of the gray-haired patriarch seated on the bamboo floor of a thatch-covered Lāo house, teaching some one to read. Of course, the book faced the pupil, and it was often said that he had taught so many people in this way that he could read the Lāo character very readily with the book upside down. Little children instinctively loved him, and it is therefore needless to say that he loved them. In spite of his long snow-white beard, never seen in men of this land and a strange sight to any Lāo child, the children readily came to him. Parents have been led to God because Dr. McGilvary loved their children and laid his hands upon them. In no other capacity was the spirit of the man more manifest than in that of a shepherd. Always on the alert for every opportunity, counting neither time nor distance nor the hardship of inclement weather, swollen streams, pathless jungle, or impassable road, he followed the example of his Master in seeking to save the lost. His very last journey, which probably was the immediate cause of his last illness, was a long, wearisome ride on horseback, through muddy fields and deep irrigating ditches, to visit a man whom he had befriended many years ago and who seemed to be an inquirer.”

Dr. McGilvary was pre-eminently a man who walked with God. His piety was not a mere profession, but a pervasive and abiding force. He knew no greater joy than to declare the Gospel of his blessed Lord to the people to whose up-lifting he had devoted his life. “If to be great is ‘to take the common things of life and walk truly among them,’ he was a great man—great in soul, great in simplicity, great in faith and great in love. Siam is the richer because Daniel McGilvary gave her fifty-three years of unselfish service.” Mrs. Curtis, the gifted author of The Laos of North Siam, says of Dr. McGilvary: “Neither Carey nor Judson surpassed him in strength of faith and zeal of purpose; neither Paton nor Chalmers has outranked him in the wonders of their achievements, and not one of the other hundreds of missionaries ever has had more evidence of God’s blessing upon their work.”

Not only the missionaries but the Lāo people loved him as a friend and venerated him as a father. Some of his intimate friends were the abbots and monks of the Buddhist monasteries and the high officials of the country. No one could know him without recognizing the nobility of soul of this saintly patriarch, in whom was no guile. December 6th, 1910, many Americans and Europeans celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his marriage. The King of Siam through Prince Damrong, Minister of the Interior, sent a congratulatory message. Letters, telegrams, and gifts poured in from many different places. The Christian people of the city presented a large silver tray, on which was engraved: “The Christian people of Chiengmai to Dr. and Mrs. McGilvary, in memory of your having brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ to us forty-three years ago.” The tray showed in relief the old rest-house where Dr. and Mrs. McGilvary spent their first two years in Chiengmai, the residence which was later their home of many years, the old dilapidated bridge, and the handsome new bridge which spans the river opposite the Christian Girls’ School—thus symbolizing the old and the new eras.

The recent tours of exploration by the Rev. W. Clifton Dodd, D.D., and the Rev. John H. Freeman have disclosed the fact that the Lāo peoples are far more numerous and more widely distributed than we had formerly supposed. Their numbers are now estimated at from twelve to sixteen millions, and their habitat includes not only the Lāo States of northern Siam but extensive regions north and northeastward in the Shan States, Southern China, and French Indo-China. The evangelization of these peoples is, therefore, an even larger and more important undertaking than it was understood to be only a few years ago. All the more honour, therefore, must be assigned to Dr. McGilvary, who laid foundations upon which a great superstructure must now be built.

Dr. McGilvary died as he would have wished to die and as any Christian worker might wish to die. There was no long illness. He continued his great evangelistic and literary labours almost to the end. Only a short time before his death, he made another of his famous itinerating journeys, preaching the Gospel to the outlying villages, guiding perplexed people and comforting the sick and dying. He recked as little of personal hardship as he had all his life, thinking nothing of hard travelling, simple fare, and exposure to sun, mud, and rain. Not long after his return and after a few brief days of illness, he quietly “fell on sleep,” his death the simple but majestic and dignified ending of a great earthly career.

The Lāo country had never seen such a funeral as that which marked the close of this memorable life. Princes, Governors, and High Commissioners of State sorrowed with multitudes of common people. The business of Chiengmai was suspended, offices were closed, and flags hung at half-mast as the silent form of the great missionary was borne to its last resting-place in the land to which he was the first bringer of enlightenment, and whose history can never be truly written without large recognition of his achievements.

Fortunately, Dr. McGilvary had completed this autobiography before his natural powers had abated, and had sent the manuscript to his brother-in-law, Professor Cornelius B. Bradley of the University of California. Dr. Bradley, himself a son of a great missionary to Siam, has done his editorial work with sympathetic insight. It has been a labour of love to him to put these pages through the press, and every friend of the Lāo people and of Dr. McGilvary is his debtor. The book itself is characterized by breadth of sympathy, richness of experience, clearness of statement, and high literary charm. No one can read these pages without realizing anew that Dr. McGilvary was a man of fine mind, close observation, and descriptive gifts. The book is full of human interest. It is the story of a man who tells about the things that he heard and saw and who tells his story well. I count it a privilege to have this opportunity of commending this volume as one of the books which no student of southern Asia and of the missionary enterprise can afford to overlook.

Arthur J. Brown.

156 Fifth Avenue, New York.

PREFACE

Years ago, in the absence of any adequate work upon the subject, the officers of our Missionary Board and other friends urged me to write a book on the Lāo Mission. Then there appeared Mrs. L. W. Curtis’ interesting volume, The Laos of North Siam, much to be commended for its accuracy and its valuable information, especially in view of the author’s short stay in the field. But no such work exhausts its subject.

I have always loved to trace the providential circumstances which led to the founding of the Lāo Mission and directed its early history. And it seems important that before it be too late, that early history should be put into permanent form. I have, therefore, endeavoured to give, with some fulness of detail, the story of the origin and inception of the Mission, and of its early struggles which culminated in the Edict of Religious Toleration. And in the later portions of the narrative I have naturally given prominence to those things which seemed to continue the characteristic features and the personal interest of that earlier period of outreach and adventure, and especially my long tours into the “regions beyond.”

The appearance during the past year of Rev. J. H. Freeman’s An Oriental Land of the Free, giving very full and accurate information regarding the present status of the Mission, has relieved me of the necessity of going over the same ground again. I have, therefore, been content to draw my narrative to a close with the account of my last long tour in 1898.

The work was undertaken with many misgivings, since my early training and the nature of my life-work have not been the best preparation for authorship. I cherished the secret hope that one of my own children would give the book its final revision for the press. But at last an appeal was made to my brother-in-law, Professor Cornelius B. Bradley of the University of California, whose birth and years of service in Siam, whose broad scholarship, fine literary taste, and hearty sympathy with our missionary efforts indicated him as the man above all others best qualified for this task. His generous acceptance of this work, and the infinite pains he has taken in the revision and editing of this book, place me under lasting obligations to him.

I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. W. A. Briggs and to Rev. J. H. Freeman for the use of maps prepared by them, and to Dr. Briggs and others for the use of photographs.

Daniel McGilvary.

April 6, 1911,

Chiengmai.

NOTE BY THE EDITOR

The task which has fallen to me in connection with this book, was undertaken as a labour of love; and such it seems to me even more, now that it ends in sadness of farewell. It has not been an easy task. The vast spaces to be traversed, and the months of time required before a question could receive its answer, made consultation with the author almost impossible. And the ever-present fear that for him the night might come before the work could receive a last revision at his hands, or even while he was still in the midst of his story, led me continually to urge upon him the need of persevering in his writing—which was evidently becoming an irksome task—and on my part to hasten on a piecemeal revision as the chapters came to hand, though as yet I had no measure of the whole to guide me.

It is, therefore, a great comfort to know that my urgency and haste were not in vain; that all of the revision reached him in time to receive his criticism and correction—though his letter on the concluding chapter was, as I understand, the very last piece of writing that he ever did. How serene and bright it was, and with no trace of the shadow so soon to fall!

But the draft so made had far outgrown the possible limits of publication, and was, of course, without due measure and proportion of parts. In the delicate task of its reduction I am much indebted to the kind suggestions of the Rev. Arthur J. Brown, D.D., and the Rev. A. W. Halsey, D.D., Secretaries of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, and of the Rev. W. C. Dodd, D.D., of the Lāo Mission, who, fortunately, was in this country, and who read the manuscript. For what appears in this book, however, I alone must assume the responsibility. “An autobiography is a personal book, expressive of personal opinion.” And whether we agree with them or not, the opinions of a man like Dr. McGilvary, formed during a long lifetime of closest contact with the matters whereof he speaks, are an essential part not only of the history of those matters, but of the portrait of the man, and far more interesting than any mere details of events or scenes. On all grave questions, therefore, on which he has expressed his deliberate opinion, I have preferred to err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion.

The plan adopted in this volume for spelling Siamese and Lāo words is intended to make possible, and even easy, a real approximation to the native pronunciation. Only the tonal inflections of native speech and the varieties of aspiration are ignored, as wholly foreign to our usage and, therefore, unmanageable.

The consonant-letters used and the digraphs ch and ng have their common English values.

The vowels are as follows:

Long ā as in father

ē as in they

ī as in pique

ō as in rode

ū as in rude, rood

aw as in lawn

ê as in there (without the r)

ô as in world (without the r)

û is the high-mixed vowel, not found in English.

It may be pronounced as u.

Short a as in about (German Mann)—not as in hat.

e as in set

i as in sit

o as in obey (N. Eng. coat)—not as in cot.

u as in pull, foot—not as in but.

The last four long vowels have also their corresponding shorts, but since these rarely occur, it has not been thought worth while to burden the scheme with extra characters to represent them.

The diphthongs are combinations of one of these vowels, heavily stressed, and nearly always long in quantity—which makes it seem to us exaggerated or drawled—with a “vanish” of short i, o, (for u), or a. ai (= English long i, y) and ao (= English ow) are the only diphthongs with short initial element, and are to be distinguished from āi and āo. In deference to long established usage in maps and the like, ie is used in this volume where ia would be the consistent spelling, and oi for awi.

A word remains to be said concerning the name of the people among whom Dr. McGilvary spent his life. That name has suffered uncommonly hard usage, especially at the hands of Americans, as the following brief history will show. Its original form in European writing was Lāo, a fairly accurate transcription by early French travellers of the name by which the Siamese call their cousins to the north and east. The word is a monosyllable ending in a diphthong similar to that heard in the proper names Macāo, Mindanāo, Callāo. In French writing the name often appeared in the plural form, les Laos; the added s, however, being silent, made no difference with the pronunciation. This written plural, then, it would seem, English-speaking people took over without recognizing the fact that it was only plural, and made it their standard form for all uses, singular as well as plural. With characteristic ignorance or disregard of its proper pronunciation, on the mere basis of its spelling, they have imposed on it a barbarous pronunciation of their own—Lay-oss. It is to be regretted that the usage of American missionaries has been most effective in giving currency and countenance to this blunder—has even added to it the further blunder of using it as the name of the region or territory, as well as of the people. But the word is purely ethnical—a proper adjective like our words French or English, and, like these, capable of substantive use in naming either the people or their language, but not their land. Needless to say, these errors have no currency whatever among European peoples excepting the English, and they have very little currency in England. It seems high time for us of America to amend not only our false pronunciation, but our false usage, and the false spelling upon which these rest. In accordance with the scheme of spelling adopted in this work, the a of the name Lāo is marked with the macron to indicate its long quantity and stress.

Cornelius Beach Bradley.

Berkeley, California,

December, 1911.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Heredity and early environment exercise such a determining influence in forming a man’s character and shaping his destiny that, without some knowledge of these as a clew, his after-life would often be unintelligible. And beyond these there is doubtless a current of events, directing the course of every man’s life, which no one else can see so clearly as the man himself. In the following review of my early life, I have confined myself, therefore, to those events which seem to have led me to my life-work, or to have prepared me for it.

By race I am a Scotsman of Scotsmen. My father, Malcom McGilvary, was a Highland lad, born in the Isle of Skye, and inheriting the marked characteristics of his race. In 1789, when Malcom was eleven years old, my grandfather brought his family to the United States, and established himself in Moore County, North Carolina, on the headwaters of the Cape Fear River. The McGilvarys had but followed in the wake of an earlier immigration of Scottish Highlanders, whose descendants to this day form a large proportion of the population of Moore, Cumberland, Richmond, Robeson, and other counties of North Carolina. My father’s brothers gradually scattered, one going to the southwestern, and two to the northwestern frontier. My father, being the youngest of the family, remained with his parents on the homestead. The country was then sparsely settled; communication was slow and uncertain. The scattered members of the family gradually lost sight of one another and of the home. My mother belonged to the McIver clan—from the same region of the Scottish Highlands, and as numerous in North Carolina as the McGilvarys were scarce. She was born in this country not long after the arrival of her parents.

I was born May 16th, 1828, being the youngest of seven children. As soon after my birth as my mother could endure the removal, she was taken to Fayetteville, thirty-five miles distant, to undergo a dangerous surgical operation. The journey was a trying one. Anæsthetics were as yet unknown. My poor mother did not long survive the shock. She died on the 23d of November of that year.

Since feeding-bottles were not then in use, the motherless infant was passed around to the care of aunts and cousins, who had children of like age. Two aunts in particular, Catharine McIver and Margaret McNeill, and a cousin, Effie McIver, always claimed a share in me for their motherly ministrations till, at last, I could be turned over to my sister Mary. She, though but six years my senior, was old beyond her years; and the motherly care with which she watched over her little charge was long remembered and spoken of in the family.

When I was four years old, my father married his second wife, Miss Nancy McIntosh. The next nine years, till my father’s death, June 8th, 1841, were spent in the uneventful routine of a godly family in a country home. My father’s rigid ideas of family discipline were inherited from his Presbyterian ancestors in Scotland, and his own piety was of a distinctly old-school type. He was a ruling elder in the church at Buffalo, Fayetteville Presbytery, in which office he was succeeded by my brother, Evander, and three others of his sons became elders in other churches. No pressure of business was ever allowed to interfere with family worship night and morning. A psalm or hymn from the old village hymnbook always formed part of the service. My father was an early riser, and, in the winter time, family worship was often over before the dawn. Almost every spare moment of his time he spent in reading Scott’s Family Bible, the Philadelphia Presbyterian, or one of the few books of devotion which composed the family library. The special treasure of the book-case was the great quarto Illustrated Family Bible, with the Apocrypha and Brown’s Concordance, published by M. Carey, Philadelphia, 1815. It was the only pictorial book in the library, and its pictures were awe-inspiring to us children—especially those in the Book of Revelation:—The Dragon Chained, The Beast with Seven Heads and Ten Horns, and the Vision of the Four Seals. These and the solemn themes of Russell’s Seven Sermons—which on rainy days I used to steal away by myself to read—made a profound impression on me.

Scottish folk always carry the school with the kirk. Free schools were unknown; but after the crops were “laid by,” we always had a subscription school, in which my father, with his large family, had a leading interest. The teacher “boarded around” with the pupils. Our regular night-task was three questions and answers in the Shorter Catechism—no small task for boys of ten or twelve years. My memory of the Catechism once stood me in good stead in after-life. When examined for licensure by the Orange Presbytery, I was asked, “What is man’s state by nature?” In reply I gave the answers to the nineteenth and twentieth questions in the Catechism. A perceptible smile passed over the faces of many of the presbyters, and Father Lynch said, “He is right on the Catechism. He will pass.” In those days to be “right on the Catechism” would atone for many failures in Hodge or Turretin.

The church was at the village of Buffalo, four miles from our home, but no one of the family was expected to be absent from the family pew on “the Sabbath.” Carriages were a later luxury in that region. Our two horses carried father and mother, with the youngest of the little folks mounted behind, till he should be able to walk with the rest.

The great event of the year was the camp-meeting at the Fall Communion. It served as an epoch from which the events of the year before and after it were dated. For weeks before it came, all work on the farm was arranged with reference to “Buffalo Sacrament”—pronounced with long a in the first syllable. It was accounted nothing for people to come fifteen, twenty, or even forty miles to the meetings. Every pew-holder had a tent, and kept open house. No stranger went away hungry. Neighbouring ministers were invited to assist the pastor. Services began on Friday, and closed on Monday, unless some special interest suggested the wisdom of protracting them further. The regular order was: A sunrise prayer-meeting, breakfast, a prayer-meeting at nine, a sermon at ten, an intermission, and then another sermon. The sermons were not accounted of much worth if they were not an hour long. The pulpit was the tall old-fashioned boxpulpit with a sounding-board above. For want of room in the church, the two sermons on Sunday were preached from a stand in the open air. At the close of the second sermon the ruling elders, stationed in various parts of the congregation, distributed to the communicants the “tokens,”[^[1]] which admitted them to the sacramental table. Then, in solemn procession, the company marched up the rising ground to the church, singing as they went:

“Children of the Heavenly King,

As ye journey sweetly sing.”

[1]. The “token” was a thin square piece of lead stamped with the initial letter of the name of the church.

It was a beautiful sight, and we boys used to climb the hill in advance to see it. When the audience was seated, there was a brief introductory exercise. Then a hymn was sung, while a group of communicants filled the places about the communion table. There was an address by one of the ministers, during the progress of which the bread and the wine were passed to the group at the table. Then there was singing again, while the first group retired, and a second group took its place. The same ceremony was repeated for them, and again for others, until all communicants present had participated. The communion service must have occupied nearly two hours. One thing I remember well—when the children’s dinner-time came (which was after all the rest had dined), the sun was low in the heavens, and there was still a night service before us. Notwithstanding some inward rebellion, it seemed all right then. But the same thing nowadays would drive all the young people out of the church.

With some diffidence I venture to make one criticism on our home life. The “Sabbath” was too rigidly observed to commend itself to the judgment and conscience of children—too rigidly, perhaps, for the most healthy piety in adults. It is hard to convince boys that to whistle on Sunday, even though the tune be “Old Hundred,” is a sin deserving of censure. An afternoon stroll in the farm or the orchard might even have clarified my father’s vision for the enjoyment of his Scott’s Bible at night. It would surely have been a means of grace to his boys. But such was the Scottish type of piety of those days, and it was strongly held. The family discipline was of the reserved and dignified type, rather than of the affectionate. Implicit obedience was the law for children. My father loved his children, but never descended to the level of familiarity with them when young, and could not sympathize with their sports.

But dark days were coming. Brother John Martin presently married and moved west. In August, 1840, an infant sister died of quinsy—the first death I ever witnessed. On June 8th, 1841, the father and “house-bond” of the family was taken away. The inheritance he left his children was the example of an upright, spotless life—of more worth than a legacy of silver and gold. These we might have squandered, but that was inalienable.

At thirteen, I was small for my age—too small to do a man’s work on the farm; and there was no money with which to secure for me an education. Just then occurred one of those casual incidents which often determine the whole course of one’s life. Mr. Roderick McIntosh, one of my mother’s cousins, being disabled for hard work on the farm, had learned the tailor’s trade, and was then living in the village of Pittsboro, twenty-one miles away. His father was a neighbour of ours, and a man after my father’s own heart. The two families had thus always been very intimate. While the question of my destiny was thus in the balance, this cousin, one day, while on a visit to his father, called at our house. He had mounted his horse to leave, when, turning to Evander, he asked, “What is Dan’l going to do?” My brother replied, “There he is; ask him.” Turning to me, he said, “Well, Dan’l, how would you like to come and live with me? I will teach you a trade.” I had never thought of such a thing, nor had it ever been mentioned in the family. But somehow it struck me favourably. Instinctively I replied, “I believe I should like it.” A life-question could not have been settled more fortuitously. But it was the first step on the way to Siam and the Lāo Mission.

On the last day of August, 1841, I bade farewell to the old home, with all its pleasant associations. Every spot of it was dear, but never so dear as then. Accompanied by my brother Evander, each of us riding one of the old family horses, I started out for my new home. The departure was not utterly forlorn, since Evander was still with me. But the parting from him, as he started back next day, was probably the hardest thing I had ever experienced. I had to seek a quiet place and give vent to a flood of tears. For a time I was inexpressibly sad. I realized, as never before, that I was cut loose from the old moorings—was alone in the world. But the sorrows of youth are soon assuaged. No one could have received a warmer welcome in the new home than I did. There were two children in the family, and they helped to fill the void made by the separation.

Pittsboro was not a large village, but its outlook was broader than that of my home. The world seemed larger. I myself felt larger than I had done as a country boy. I heard discussion of politics and of the questions of the day. The county was strongly Whig, but Mr. McIntosh was an unyielding Democrat, and as fond of argument as a politician. According to southern custom, stores and shops were favourite resorts for passing away idle time, and for sharpening the wits of the villagers. The recent Presidential campaign of 1840 furnished unending themes for discussion in our little shop.

There was no Presbyterian church in Pittsboro at that time. The church-going population was divided between the Methodist and the Episcopalian churches, the former being the larger. With my cousin’s family I attended the Methodist church. On my first Sunday I joined the Methodist Sunday School, and that school was the next important link in my chain of life. Its special feature was a system of prizes. A certain number of perfect answers secured a blue ticket; ten of these brought a yellow ticket; and yellow tickets, according to the number of them, entitled the possessor to various prizes—a hymnbook, a Bible, or the like. On the first Sunday I was put into a class of boys of my own age, at work on a little primer of one hundred and six questions, all answered in monosyllables. By the next Sunday I was able to recite the whole, together with the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed at the end. It was no great feat; but the teacher and the school thought it was. So, on the strength of my very first lesson, I got a yellow ticket, and was promoted to the next higher class. That stimulated my ambition, and I devoted my every spare hour to study. The next book was one of questions and answers on the four Gospels. They were very easy; I was able to commit to memory several hundred answers during the week. In a few Sundays I got my first prize; and it was not long before I had secured all the prizes offered in the school. What was of far more value than the prizes was the greater love for study and for the Scriptures which the effort had awakened in me, and a desire for an education. The shop was often idle; I had plenty of time for study, and made the most of it.

At one of the subsequent Quarterly Meetings, a Rev. Mr. Brainard, who had considerable reputation as a revivalist, preached one Sunday night a vivid and thrilling sermon on Noah’s Ark and the Flood. So marked was the impression on the audience, that, at the close, according to the Methodist custom, “mourners” were invited to the altar. Many accepted the invitation. A young friend sitting beside me was greatly affected. With streaming eyes he said, “Dan’l, let us go, too,” rising up and starting as he spoke. After a few moments I followed. By this time the space about the altar was well filled. There was great excitement and no little confusion—exhortation, singing, and prayer going on all at once. A number of persons made profession of religion, and soon my young friend joined them. He was full of joy, and was surprised to find that I was not so, too. The meetings were continued night after night, and each night I went to the altar. As I look back upon it from this distance, it seems to me that, with much exhortation to repent and believe, there was not enough of clear and definite instruction regarding the plan of salvation, or the offices and work of Christ. One night, in a quiet hour at home, the grounds and method of a sinner’s acceptance of Christ became clear to me, and He became my Lord.

Soon after, when invitation was given to the new converts to join the church as probationers, I was urged by some good friends to join with the rest; and was myself not a little inclined to do so. It was no doubt the influence of my cousin that enabled me to withstand the excitement of the revival and the gentle pressure of my Methodist friends, and to join, instead, my father’s old church at Buffalo. But I owe more than I shall ever know to that Sunday School, and since then I have always loved the Methodist Church. Meanwhile the prospects for an education grew no brighter, though Mr. Brantley, then a young graduate in charge of the Pittsboro Academy, but afterward a distinguished Baptist minister of Philadelphia, gave me a place in his school at idle times; and a Dr. Hall used to lend me books to read.

When the opportunity for acquiring an education finally came, it was as unexpected as a clap of thunder out of a blue sky. The celebrated Bingham School, now in Asheville, North Carolina, was then, as now, the most noted in the South. It was started by Rev. William Bingham in Pittsboro, North Carolina, in the closing years of the eighteenth century. It was moved to Hillsboro by his son, the late William J. Bingham, father of the present Principal. The school was patronized by the leading families of the South. The number of pupils was strictly limited. To secure a place, application had to be made a year or more in advance.

My surprise, therefore, can well be imagined, when one day Baccus King, a young boy of the town, walked into the shop with a letter addressed to Master Daniel McGilvary from no less a personage than William J. Bingham, the great teacher and Principal. At first I thought I was the victim of some boyish trick. But there was the signature, and the explanation that followed removed all doubt. Nathan Stedman, an influential citizen of Pittsboro, was an early acquaintance and friend of Mr. Bingham. He had visited the school in person to secure a place for his nephew, young King, and had brought back with him the letter for me. What Mr. Bingham knew of me I never discovered. No doubt Mr. Stedman could have told, though up to that time I had never more than spoken with him. Be that as it may, there was the letter with its most generous offer that I take a course in Bingham School at the Principal’s expense. He was to board me and furnish all necessary expenses, which, after graduation, I was to refund by teaching. If I became a minister of the Gospel, the tuition was to be free; otherwise I was to refund that also. To young King’s enquiry what I would do, I replied, “Of course, I shall go.” My cousin, Mr. McIntosh, was scarcely less delighted than I was at the unexpected opening.

The invitation to attend Bingham School came in the fall of 1845, when I was in my eighteenth year. There were then only two weeks till the school should open. I had little preparation to make. A pine box painted red was soon got ready to serve as a trunk, for my wardrobe was by no means elaborate. Mr. Stedman kindly offered me a seat with Baccus and a friend of his who was returning to the school. On the way Baccus’ friend entertained us with stories of the rigid discipline, for this was in the days when the rod was not spared. I had no fears of the rod, but I trembled lest I should not sustain myself as well as such great kindness demanded. It might be a very different thing from winning a reputation in a Methodist Sunday School.

It was dusk when we reached The Oaks. The family was at supper. Mr. Bingham came out to receive us. He told Baccus’ friend to take him to his own old quarters, and, turning to me, said, “I have made arrangements for you to board with Mr. C., and to room with Mr. K., the assistant teacher, till my house is finished, when you are to live with us. But we are at supper now. You must be hungry after your long ride. Come in and eat with us.” After supper, Mr. Bingham went with me to my boarding-house, and introduced me to my hosts and to my chum, David Kerr. He welcomed me, and said he thought we should get along finely together. We not only did that, but he became a warm friend to whom I owed much. So I was in the great Bingham School, overwhelmed with a succession of unexpected kindnesses from so many quarters! What did it all mean?

WILLIAM J. BINGHAM

My highest anticipations of the school were realized. If there ever was a born teacher, William J. Bingham was one. Latin and Greek were taught then by a method very different from the modern one. Before a sentence was read or translated, the invariable direction was—master your grammar. In grammar-drill Mr. Bingham could have no superior. Bullion’s Grammars and Readers were the text-books. The principal definitions were learned practically verbatim. The coarse print was required of all in the class. The older pupils were advised to learn notes, exceptions, and all. I never became so familiar with any other books as with that series of grammars. We were expected to decline every noun and adjective, alone or combined, from nominative singular to ablative plural, backwards or forwards, and to give, at a nod, voice, mood, tense, number, and person of any verb in the lesson. These exercises became at last so easy that they were great fun. Even now, sixty years later, I often put myself to sleep by repeating the old paradigms.

It may seem that my estimate of Mr. Bingham is prejudiced by my sense of personal obligation to him for his kindness. Yet I doubt not that the universal verdict of every one who went there to study would be that he should be rated as one of the world’s greatest teachers. The South owes much to him for the dignity he gave to the profession of teaching. No man ever left a deeper impress on me. Thousands of times I have thanked the Lord for the opportunity to attend his school.

I was graduated from the school in May, 1849, a few days before I was twenty-one years old. On leaving my kind friends at The Oaks, I was again at sea. It will be remembered that, by my original agreement, I was booked for teaching—but I had no idea where. Once more the unexpected happened. In the midst of negotiations for a school in the southern part of the state, I was greatly surprised at receiving an offer from one of the prominent business men of my own town, Pittsboro, to assist me in organizing a new school of my own there. With much doubt and hesitation on my part—for there were already two preparatory schools in the place—the venture was made, and I began with ten pupils taught in a little business office. The number was considerably increased during the year. But when the second year opened, I was put in charge of the Academy, whose Principal had resigned. Here, in work both pleasant and fairly profitable, I remained until the four years for which I had agreed to stay were up.

I had by no means reached my ideal. But, as my friends had predicted, it had been a success. Some of my warmest supporters were sure that I was giving up a certainty for an uncertainty, in not making teaching my life-work. It had evidently been the hope of my friends from the first that I would make Pittsboro my home, and build up a large and permanent school there. But my purpose of studying for the ministry had never wavered, and that made it easier for me to break off.

During these four years my relations with the newly organized Presbyterian church had been most pleasant and profitable. There was no resisting the appeal that I should become ruling elder. The superintendency of the Sunday School also fell naturally to me, and opened up another field of usefulness. The friendship formed with the pastor, the Rev. J. H. McNeill, is one of the pleasant memories of my life.

One feature of the church connection must not be passed over. Neither of the other elders was so circumstanced as to be able to attend the meetings of the Orange Presbytery. Three of the leading professors in the University were members of the Presbytery, and all the leading schools within its bounds were taught by Presbyterian ministers or elders. To accommodate this large group of teachers, the meetings were held in midsummer and midwinter. Thus it fell to my lot to represent the Pittsboro church at the Presbytery during nearly the whole of the four years of my stay in Pittsboro. As it was then constituted, its meetings were almost equal to a course in church government. The Rev. J. Doll, one of the best of parliamentarians, was stated clerk. A group of members such as the two Drs. Phillips, father and son, Dr. Elisha Mitchell, of the University, and many others that could be named, would have made any assembly noted. Professor Charles Phillips, as chairman of the committee on candidates for the ministry, came into closer touch with me than most of the others. He afterwards followed my course in the Seminary with an interest ripening into a friendship which continued throughout his life.

The meetings of the Presbytery were not then merely formal business meetings. They began on Wednesday and closed on Monday. They were looked forward to by the church in which they were to be held as spiritual and intellectual feasts. To the members themselves they were seasons of reunion, where friendships were cemented, and where wits were sharpened by intellectual conflicts, often before crowded congregations.

Union Seminary, now of Richmond, Virginia, has always been under the direction of the Synods of North Carolina and Virginia; and there were strong reasons why students from those Synods should study there. They were always reminded of that obligation. But the high reputation of Drs. Hodge and Alexander was a strong attraction toward Princeton. My pastor and Professor Phillips, chairman of the committee in charge of me, had both studied there. So I was allowed to have my preference. No doubt this proved another stepping-stone to Siam. Union Seminary was not then enthusiastic in regard to foreign missions, as it has since become. At the last meeting of Presbytery that I was to attend, Dr. Alexander Wilson moved that, inasmuch as Orange Presbytery owned a scholarship in Princeton Seminary, I be assigned to it. To my objection that I had made money to pay my own way, he replied, “You will have plenty of need of your money. You can buy books with it.” I followed the suggestion and laid in a good library.

II
MINISTERIAL TRAINING

I entered Princeton Seminary in the fall of 1853. I did not lodge in the Seminary building, but, through the kindness of Rev. Daniel Derouelle—whom, as agent of the American Bible Society, I had come to know during his visits to Pittsboro—I found a charming home in his family. There were, of course, some disadvantages in living a mile and a half away from the Seminary. I could not have the same intimate relations with my fellow students which I might have had if lodged in the Seminary. But I had the delightful home-life which most of them missed altogether. And the compulsory exercise of two, or sometimes three, trips a day, helped to keep me in health throughout my course. I became, indeed, a first-rate walker—an accomplishment which has since stood me in good stead in all my life abroad.

Being from the South, and not a college graduate, as were most of the students, I felt lonesome enough when, on the first morning of the session, I entered the Oratory and looked about me without discovering a single face that I knew. But at the close of the lecture some one who had been told by a friend to look out for me, touched me on the shoulder, made himself known, and then took me off to introduce me to J. Aspinwall Hodge, who was to be a classmate of mine. No man ever had a purer or a better friend than this young man, afterward Dr. J. Aspinwall Hodge; and I never met a friend more opportunely.

Of our revered teachers and of the studies of the Seminary course there is no need to speak here. Our class was a strong one. Among its members were such men as Gayley, Mills, Jonathan Wilson, Nixon, Lefevre, and Chaney. Of these Gayley and Mills were already candidates for missionary work abroad. In other classes were Robert McMullen and Isidore Loewenthal, destined to become martyrs in Cawnpore and Peshawur. Many were the stirring appeals we heard from these men. Dr. Charles Hodge, too, had given a son to India; and he never spoke more impressively than when he was pleading the cause of foreign missions. Princeton, moreover, because of its proximity to New York and to the headquarters of the various missionary societies established there, was a favourite field for the visits of the Secretaries of these organizations, and of returned missionaries. A notable visit during my first year was that of Dr. Alexander Duff, then in his prime. No one who heard him could forget his scathing criticism of the church for “playing at missions,” or his impassioned appeals for labourers.

So the question was kept constantly before me. But during the first two years, the difficulty of the acquisition of a foreign language by a person not gifted in his own, seemed an obstacle well-nigh insuperable. Conscience suggested a compromise. Within the field of Home Missions was there not equal need of men to bring the bread of life to those who were perishing without it? With the object of finding some such opportunity, I spent my last vacation, in the summer of 1855, in Texas as agent of the American Sunday School Union.

Texas afforded, indeed, great opportunities for Christian work; but in the one object of my quest—a field where Christ was not preached—I was disappointed. In every small village there was already a church—often more than one. Even in country schoolhouses Methodists, Baptists, and Cumberland Presbyterians had regular Sunday appointments, each having acquired claim to a particular Sunday of the month. Conditions were such that the growth of one sect usually meant a corresponding weakening of the others. It was possible, of course, to find local exceptions. But it is easier even now to find villages by the hundred, with three, four, and even five Protestant churches, aided by various missionary societies; where all the inhabitants, working together, could do no more than support one church well. This may be necessary; but it is surely a great waste.

From this trip I had just returned with these thoughts in my mind, and was entering upon my senior year, when it was announced that Dr. S. R. House, a missionary from Siam, would address the students. Expectation was on tiptoe to hear from this new kingdom of Siam. The address was a revelation to us all. The opening of the kingdom to American missionaries by the reigning monarch, Mahā Mongkut—now an old story—was new then, and sounded like a veritable romance. My hesitation was ended. Here was not merely a village or a parish, but a whole kingdom, just waking from its long, dark, hopeless sleep. Every sermon I preached there might be to those who had never heard that there is a God in heaven who made them, or a Saviour from sin.

The appeal was for volunteers to go at once. None, however, of the men who had announced themselves as candidates for service abroad were available for Siam. They were all pledged to other fields. The call found Jonathan Wilson and myself in much the same state of expectancy, waiting for a clear revelation of duty. After anxious consultation and prayer together, and with Dr. House, we promised him that we would give the matter our most serious thought. If the Lord should lead us thither, we would go.

Meanwhile the Rev. Andrew B. Morse had been appointed a missionary to Siam, and the immediate urgency of the case was thus lightened. Shortly before the close of my Seminary course, in 1856, there came to me a call to the pastorate of two contiguous churches, those of Carthage and of Union, in my native county in North Carolina. The call seemed a providential one, and I accepted it for one year only. My classmate, Wilson, soon after accepted a call to work among the Indians in Spencer Academy.

My parish was an admirable one for the training of a young man. The church at Union was one of the oldest in the state. The church at Carthage, five miles away, was a colony from Union. No distinct geographical line separated the two. Many of the people regularly attended both. That, of course, made the work harder for a young pastor. The extreme limits of the two parishes were fifteen miles apart. But these were church-going folk, mostly of Scottish descent—not “dry-weather Christians.” The pastorate had been vacant a whole year.

At the first morning service the church was crowded to its utmost capacity. Some came, no doubt, from curiosity to hear the new preacher; but most of them were hungry for the Gospel. They had all known my father; and some had known me—or known of me—from boyhood. I could not have had a more sympathetic audience, as I learned from the words of appreciation and encouragement spoken to me after church—especially those spoken by my brother, who was present.

The year passed rapidly. The work had prospered and was delightful. In it I formed the taste for evangelistic touring, which was afterwards to be my work among the Lāo. There had been a number of accessions in both churches. It was easy to become engrossed in one’s first charge among a people so sympathetic, and to overlook far-away Siam. Indeed, I had become so far influenced by present surroundings as to allow my name to be laid before a meeting of the congregation with a view to becoming their permanent pastor. Their choice of me was unanimous. Moreover, I had been dismissed from my old Presbytery to the one within whose bounds my parish was. The regular meeting of the latter was not far off, when arrangements were to be made for my ordination and installation.

As the time drew near, do what I might, my joy in accepting the call seemed marred by the thought of Siam. I learned that the Siamese Mission, instead of growing stronger, was becoming weaker. Mr. Morse’s health had completely broken down during his first year in the field. He was then returning to the United States. Mrs. Mattoon had already come back an invalid. Her husband, after ten years in Siam, was greatly in need of a change; but was holding on in desperation, hoping against hope that he might be relieved.

The question of my going to Siam, which had been left an open one, must now soon be settled by my accepting or declining. I needed counsel, but knew not on what earthly source to call. When the question of Siam first came up in Princeton, I had written to leading members of the Orange Presbytery for advice, stating the claims of Siam so strongly that I was sure these men would at least give me some encouragement toward going. But the reply I had from one of them was typical of all the rest: “We do not know about Siam; but we do know of such and such a church and of such and such a field vacant here in Orange Presbytery. Still, of course, it may be your duty to go to Siam.” In that quarter, surely, there was no light for me. So I devoted Saturday, August 1st, to fasting and prayer for guidance. In the woods back of the Carthage church and the Academy, the decision was finally reached. I would go.

Next morning I stopped my chief elder on his way to church, and informed him of my decision. After listening to my statement of the case, he replied, “Of course, if it is settled, there’s nothing more to be said.” It chanced that Mr. Russell, my former assistant in the Pittsboro Academy, had just finished his theological course; and, wholly without reference to the question pending in my mind, had arranged to preach for me that day. The session was called together before service, was notified of my decision, and was reminded that the preacher of the day would be available as a successor to me. He preached a good sermon, had a conference with the session afterwards, and was virtually engaged that day. The following week brought notice of my appointment as missionary to Siam.

The last communion season of that year was one of more than usual interest. The meetings began on Friday. Since the minds of the congregation were already on the subject of foreign missions, and since Dr. McKay, from my home church, had been appointed by the Synod to preach on that subject at its coming session in Charlotte, I prevailed upon him to preach to us the sermon that he had prepared. The text was from Romans x:14, “How shall they hear without a preacher?” No subject could have been more appropriate to the occasion. It produced a profound impression. Some were affected to tears.

The sermon was a good preparation for the communion service that followed. At the night service there was deep seriousness throughout the congregation, and a general desire to have the meetings continued. On Monday there was an unexpectedly large congregation. At the busiest season of the year farmers had left their crops to come. The meetings soon grew to be one protracted prayer-meeting, with occasional short applications of Scripture to the questions which were already pressing upon our minds.

Finally, after the meetings had been continued from Friday until Wednesday week, they were reluctantly brought to a close; both because it seemed unwise to interrupt longer the regular life of the community, and also because the leaders no longer had the voice to carry them on. As a result of the meetings, there were about eighty accessions to the two Presbyterian churches, as well as a number to other churches. Many asked if I did not see in the revival reason to change my mind and remain. But the effect on me was just the opposite. It was surely the best preparation I could have had for the long test of faith while waiting for results in Siam.

Inasmuch as my certificate of dismissal had never been formally presented to the Fayetteville Presbytery, I preferred to return it to my old Orange Presbytery, and to receive my ordination at its hands. On December 11th, the Presbytery met at my old home in Pittsboro. The installation of a foreign missionary was new to the Presbytery, as well as to the church and the community. When the ordaining prayer was ended, there seemed to be but few dry eyes in the congregation. It was a day I had little dreamed of sixteen years before, when I first came to Pittsboro an orphan boy and an apprentice. I felt very small for the great work so solemnly committed to me. Missionary fields were further off in those days than they are now, and the undertaking seemed greater. The future was unknown; but in God was my trust—and He has led me.

III
BANGKOK

On reaching New York I went directly to the Mission House, then at 23 Centre Street. As I mounted the steps, the first man I met on the landing was Jonathan Wilson. We had exchanged a few letters, and each knew that the other had not forgotten Siam; but neither expected to meet the other there. “Where are you going?” said one. “I am on my way to Siam,” said the other. “So am I,” was the reply. In the meantime he had married and, with his young wife, was in New York awaiting passage. We took the first opportunity that offered, the clipper ship David Brown, bound for Singapore, and sailing on March 11th, 1858.

Sailors have a tradition that it is unlucky to have missionaries on board; but the weather was propitious throughout, and the voyage a prosperous one. We three were the only passengers, and we proved to be good sailors. Our fare was reasonably good. We had plenty of good reading, and soon settled down to steady work. The ship was somewhat undermanned; and this fact was given as an excuse for not having service on Sundays. But we had a daily prayer-meeting throughout the voyage, with just a sufficient number present to plead the promise: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name.” We also had free access to the men in the forecastle when off duty.

We had the excitement of an ocean race with a twin ship of the same line, which was to sail a week after us. As we reached Anjer Straits on the seventy-eighth day out, a sail loomed up which proved to be our competitor. She had beaten us by a week! Ten days later we reached Singapore, where, indeed, we met no brethren, but were met by welcome letters from Siam. Like Paul at the Three Taverns, “we thanked God and took courage.” One of the letters ran thus:

“Those were good words that came to our half-discouraged band—the tidings that we are to have helpers in our work.... In our loneliness we have sometimes been tempted to feel that our brethren at home had forgotten us. But we rejoice to know that there are hearts in the church which sympathize with us, and that you are willing to come and participate with us in our labours and trials, our joys and sorrows, for we have both.”

We were fortunate to secure very early passage for Bangkok. On Friday, June 18th, we reached the bar at the mouth of the Mênam River. The next day we engaged a small schooner to take us up to Bangkok. With a strong tide against us, we were not able that evening to get further than Mosquito Point—the most appropriately-named place in all that land—only to learn that we could not reach Bangkok until Monday afternoon. There was no place to sleep on board; and no sleeping would have been possible, had there been a place. By two o’clock in the morning we could endure it no longer;—the mosquito contest was too unequal. At last we found a man and his wife who would take us to the city in their two-oared skiff.

Fifty years’ residence in Siam has not surpassed the romance of that night’s ride. Leaving our goods behind, we seated ourselves in the tiny craft. With gunwales but two inches above the water’s edge, we skimmed along through a narrow winding canal overhung with strange tropical trees. The moon was full, but there was a haze in the air, adding weirdness to things but dimly seen. The sight of our first Buddhist monastery, with its white columns and grotesque figures, made us feel as if we were passing through some fairyland.

Just at dawn on Sunday morning, June 20th, 1858, we landed at the mission compound. Our quick passage of only one hundred days took our friends by surprise. Dr. House, roused by our voices on the veranda, came en déshabillé to the door to see what was the matter. Finding who we were, the eager man thrust his hand through a vacant square of the sash, and shook hands with us so, before he would wait to open the door. We were in Bangkok! It was as if we had waked up in a new world—in the Bangkok to which we had looked forward as the goal of our hopes; which was to be, as we supposed, the home of our lives.

The Rev. Mr. Mattoon was still at his post, awaiting our coming. Mrs. Mattoon and her daughters had been compelled to leave for home some time before our arrival. And not long thereafter Mr. Mattoon followed them on his furlough, long overdue. Besides the two men of our own mission, we found in Bangkok the Rev. Dan B. Bradley, M.D., who was conducting a self-supporting mission; Rev. S. J. Smith, and Rev. R. Telford of the Baptist mission.

Since neither Bangkok nor Lower Siam proved to be my permanent home, I shall content myself with a very summary account of the events of the next three years.

The first work of a new missionary is to acquire the language of the country. His constant wish is, Oh for a gift of tongues to speak to the people! As soon as a teacher could be found, I settled to work at my kaw, kā, ki, kī[^[2]]. No ambitious freshman has such an incentive for study as has the new missionary. It is well if he does not confine himself to grammar and dictionary, as he did in the case of his Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Pallegoix’s Dictionarium Linguae Thai, and his short Grammar in Latin, were all the foreign helps we had. The syntax of the language is easy; but the “tones,” the “aspirates,” and “inaspirates,” are perplexing beyond belief. You try to say “fowl.” No, that is “egg.” You mean to say “rice,” but you actually say “mountain.”

[2]. The first exercise of the Siamese Spelling-book.

A thousand times a day the new missionary longs to open his mouth, but his lips are sealed. It is a matter of continual regret that he cannot pour out his soul in the ardour of his first love, unchilled by the deadening influences to which it is sure to be subjected later. But the delay is not an unmitigated evil. He is in a new world, in which he is constantly reminded of the danger of giving offence by a breach of custom as unalterable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. A bright little boy runs up and salutes you. You stroke his long black hair, only to be reminded by one of your seniors—“Oh! you must never do that! It is a mortal offence to lay your hand on a person’s head.” So, while you are learning the language, you are learning other things as well, and of no less importance.

In the mission school there was a class of bright boys named Nê, Dit, Chûn, Kwāi, Henry, and one girl, Tūan. To my great delight, Dr. House kindly turned them over to me. It made me think I was doing something, and I really was. I soon became deeply interested in these children. Nê grew to be an important business man and an elder in the church; Tūan’s family became one of the most influential in the church. Her two sons, the late Bun It and Elder Bun Yī of the First Church in Chiengmai, have been among the very best fruits of the mission; though my personal share in their training was, of course, very slight. In the September after our arrival there was organized the Presbytery of Siam, with the four men of the mission as its constituent members. During the first two years, moreover, I made a number of tours about the country—sometimes alone, oftener with Dr. House, and once with Mr. Wilson.

I had the pleasure of meeting His Majesty the King of Siam, not only at his birthday celebrations, to which foreigners were invited, but once, also, at a public audience on the occasion of the presentation of a letter from President James Buchanan of the United States. This was through the courtesy of Mr. J. H. Chandler, the acting United States Consul. Two royal state barges were sent down to the Consulate to receive the President’s letter and the consular party. Siamese etiquette requires that the letter be accorded the same honour as would be given the President in person. In the first barge was the letter, placed in a large golden urn, with a pyramidal cover of gold, and escorted by the four officers who attend upon His Majesty when he appears in public. In the second barge was the consular party.

After a magnificent ride of four miles up the river, we were met at the palace by gilded palanquins for the members of the party, while the letter, in a special palanquin and under the golden umbrella, led the way to the Palace, some quarter of a mile distant. At the Palace gate a prince of rank met us, and ushered us into the royal presence, where His Majesty sat on his throne of gold, richly overhung with gilded tapestry. Advancing toward the throne, and bowing low, we took our stand erect, while every high prince and nobleman about us was on bended knees, not daring to raise his eyes above the floor.

The Consul then read a short introductory speech, stepped forward, and placed the letter in the extended hands of the King. Having glanced over it, the King handed it to his secretary, who read it aloud, His Majesty translating the substance of it to the princes and nobles present. The King then arose, put his scarf about his waist, girded on his golden sword, came down, and shook hands with each of the party. Then, with a wave of his hand, he said, “We have given President Buchanan the first public reception in our new palace,” adding, “I honour President Buchanan very much.” He escorted the party around the room, showing us the portraits of George Washington, President Pierce, Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert. Then, turning to the proper officer, he directed him to conduct us to an adjoining room to partake of a luncheon prepared for us; and, with a bow, withdrew.

After “tiffin,” we were escorted to the landing as we had come, and returned in like state in the royal barge to the Consulate. Altogether it was a notable occasion.

MAHĀ MONKUT,
KING OF SIAM, 1851-1872

Of the tours undertaken in Lower Siam, the one which led to the most lasting results was one in 1859 to Pechaburī, which has since become well known as one of our mission stations. For companion on this trip I had Cornelius Bradley, son of the Rev. Dr. Bradley of Bangkok. Shortly before this a rising young nobleman, and a liberal-minded friend of foreigners, had been assigned to the place ostensibly of lieutenant-governor (Pra Palat) of Pechaburī, but practically of governor. He was a brother of the future Regent; had been on the first embassy to England; and at a later period became Minister for Foreign Affairs. At our call, His Excellency received us very kindly, and before we left invited us to dine with him on the following evening.

The dinner was one that would have done credit to any hostess in America. I was still more surprised when, at the table, addressing me by a title then given to all missionaries, he said, “Maw” (Doctor), “I want you to come and live in Pechaburī. You have no family. I will furnish you a house, and give you every assistance you need. You can teach as much Christianity as you please, if only you will teach my son English. If you want a school, I will see that you have pupils.” I thanked him for the offer, but could only tell him that I would think the matter over. It might be, after all, only a Siamese cheap compliment. It seemed too good to be true. It was, however, directly in the line of my own thoughts. I had come to Siam with the idea of leaving the great commercial centres, and making the experiment among a rural population like that of my North Carolina charge.

The next day the Pra Palat called on us at our sālā,[^[3]] and again broached the subject. He was very anxious to have his son study English. In my mission work I should be untrammelled. Before leaving us, he mentioned the matter again. It was this time no courteous evasion when I told him I would come if I could.—What did it all mean?

[3]. A public rest-house or shelter, such as Buddhist piety provides everywhere for travellers, but especially in connection with the monasteries.

I returned to Bangkok full of enthusiasm for Pechaburī. The more I pondered it, the greater the offer seemed to be. Beyond my predilection for a smaller city or for rural work, I actually did not like Bangkok. Pechaburī, however, was beyond the limits of treaty rights. Permission to establish a station there could be had only by sufferance from a government not hitherto noted for liberality. Here was an invitation equivalent to a royal permit, and with no further red tape about it. I could see only one obstacle in the way. The senior member of the mission—the one who was naturally its head—I feared would not approve. And he did, indeed, look askance at the proposition. He doubted whether we could trust the promises made. And then to go so far away alone! But I thought I knew human nature well enough to trust that man. As to being alone, I was willing to risk that. Possibly it might not be best to ride a free horse too freely. I would go with my own equipment, and be at least semi-independent; though the Palat had said that he did not mind the expense, if only he could get his son taught English.

There could at least be no objection to making an experimental visit, and then continuing it as long as might seem wise. Pechaburī is within thirty hours of Bangkok. If taken sick, I could run over in a day or two. With that understanding, and with the tacit rather than the expressed sanction of the mission, I began to make preparations.

At last my preparations were complete, even to baking bread for the trip. I had fitted up a touring-boat of my own, and had engaged captain and boatmen; when, on the day before I was to start, cholera, which for some time had been sporadic in Bangkok, suddenly became epidemic. Till then Dr. James Campbell, physician to the British Consulate, and our medical authority, thought that with caution and prudence I might safely go. A general panic now arose all over the land. Dr. Bradley came to tell me that deaths were occurring hourly on the canal by which I was to travel. To go then would be to tempt providence. I had earnestly sought direction, and it came in a way little expected.

The first man I met next morning was Dr. House, coming home from Mr. Wilson’s. He had been called in the night to attend Mrs. Wilson, who had been suddenly attacked with “the disease,” as the natives euphemistically call it, being superstitiously afraid of uttering the name. Dr. House had failed to check it, and sent me to call Dr. Campbell. But he was not at home, and did not get the message till near noon. By that time the patient had reached the stage when collapse was about to ensue. The disease was finally arrested, but Mrs. Wilson was left in a very precarious condition.

Meanwhile her little daughter Harriet was also taken ill, and for a time the life of both mother and daughter was in suspense. The child lingered on till May 13th, when she was taken to a better clime. On July 14th the mother, too, ceased from her suffering, and entered on her everlasting rest.

During these months, of course, all thoughts of Pechaburī had been abandoned; nor would it then have been deemed wise to travel during the wet season. Before the next dry season came, Bangkok began to have more attractions, and I had become less ambitious to start a new station alone. On the 11th of September I became engaged to Miss Sophia Royce Bradley, daughter of the Rev. D. B. Bradley, M.D. On December 6th, 1860, we were married. In my wife I found a helpmeet of great executive ability, and admirably qualified for the diversified work before us. It was something, too, to have inherited the best traditions of one of the grand missionaries of his age.[^[4]]

[4]. Dr. Bradley’s life would be the best history we could have of Siam during its transition period. He left a voluminous diary, and it was from his pen that most of the exact information concerning Siam was long derived.

Samrē, our mission station in Bangkok, was four miles distant from the heart of the city. We greatly needed a more central station for our work. Dr. Bradley offered us the use of a house on his own premises—one of the most desirable situations in Bangkok—if we would come and live there. The mission accepted his generous offer. With reluctance I resigned whatever claim I might have to be the pioneer of the new station at Pechaburī. We were settled, as it would seem, for life, in Bangkok.

IV
PECHABURĪ—THE CALL OF THE NORTH

By this time the mission generally had become interested in the establishment of a new station at Pechaburī. Dr. and Mrs. House were designated for the post. The Doctor actually went to Pechaburī; procured there, through the help of our friend the Palat, a lot with a house on it; and thus committed the mission to the project. But the day before he was to start homeward to prepare for removal thither, he was so seriously hurt by a fall from his horse that he was confined to his bed for several months. It was even feared that he was permanently disabled for active life. A new adjustment of our personnel was thus necessitated. Dr. Mattoon had just returned from the United States with the Rev. S. G. McFarland, the Rev. N. A. McDonald, and their wives. Dr. Mattoon could not be spared from Bangkok, nor was he enthusiastic over the new station. Mr. McDonald had no desire for such experiments. Both Mr. and Mrs. McFarland were anxious to move, but were too new to the field to be sent out alone. They were urgent that we should go with them. My opportunity had come. So, early in June, 1861, we broke up the first home of our married life, and, in company with the McFarlands, moved on to our new home and our new work.

Our friend, the Pra Palat, seemed pleased that we had come, after all. His slight knowledge of English had been learned as a private pupil from Mrs. McGilvary’s own mother. He was glad, whenever he had leisure, to continue his studies with Mrs. McGilvary. Mr. McFarland preferred school work. He took the son that I was to have taught, and left me untrammelled to enter upon evangelistic work. The half-hour after each evening meal we spent in united prayer for guidance and success. Two servants of each family were selected as special subjects of prayer; and these, in due time, we had the pleasure of welcoming into the church.

Of the incidents of our Pechaburī life I have room for but a single one. As we were rising from the dinner-table one Sunday shortly after our arrival, we were surprised to see a man coming up the steps and crossing the veranda in haste, as if on a special errand. He led by the hand a little boy of ten or twelve years, and said, “I want to commit this son of mine into your care. I want you to teach him.” Struck by his earnest manner, we drew from him these facts: He was a farmer named Nāi Kawn, living some five miles out in the country. He had just heard of our arrival, had come immediately, and was very glad to find us.

We asked whether he had ever met a missionary before. No, he said, but his father—since dead—had once met Dr. Bradley, and had received a book from him. He had begged other books from neighbours who had received them but did not value them. Neither did he at first, till the great cholera scourge of 1849, when people were dying all around him. He was greatly alarmed, and learned from one of the books that Pra Yēsū heard prayer in trouble, and could save from sin. For a long time he prayed for light, until, about three years ago, he believed in Jesus, and was now happy in heart. He had heard once of Dr. Bradley’s coming to Pechaburī, but not until he was gone again. He preached to his neighbours, who called him “Kon Pra Yēsū” (Lord Jesus’ man). He had prayed for Dr. Bradley and the missionaries; he had read the story of Moses, the Epistle to the Romans, the Gospel of John, a tract on Prayer, and “The Golden Balance”; and he believed them. He could repeat portions of Romans and John verbatim; and he had his son repeat the Lord’s Prayer.

My subject at the afternoon service was Nicodemus and the New Birth. Nāi Kawn sat spellbound, frequently nodding assent. At the close we asked him to speak a few words; which he did with great clearness. On being questioned as to the Trinity, he replied that he was not sure whether he understood it. He gathered, however, that Jehovah was the Father and Ruler; that the Son came to save us by dying for us; and that the Holy Spirit is the Comforter. The difference between Jesus and Buddha is that the latter entered into Nirvana, and that was the last of him; while Jesus lives to save. He even insisted that he had seen a vision of Jesus in heaven. His other experiences were characterized by such marks of soberness that we wondered whether his faith might not have been strengthened by a dream or a vision.

This incident, coming so soon after our arrival, greatly cheered us in our work. His subsequent story is too long to follow out in detail here. His piety and his sincerity were undoubted. He lived and died a Christian; yet he never fully identified himself with the church. He insisted that he had been baptized by the Holy Ghost, and that there was no need of further baptism. Not long after this Dr. Bradley and Mr. Mattoon visited Pechaburī, examined the man, and were equally surprised at his history.

What changed our life-work from the Siamese to the Lāo? There were two principal causes. The various Lāo states which are now a part of Siam, were then ruled by feudal princes, each virtually sovereign within his own dominions, but all required to pay a triennial visit to the Siamese capital, bringing the customary gifts to their suzerain, the King of Siam, and renewing their oath of allegiance to him. Their realms served, moreover, as a “buffer” between Siam and Burma. There were six of these feudal principalities. Five of them occupied the basins of five chief tributaries of the Mênam River; namely—in order from west to east—Chiengmai, Lampūn, Lakawn, Prê, and Nān. The sixth was Lūang Prabāng on the Mê Kōng River. The rapids on all these streams had served as an effectual barrier in keeping the northern and the southern states quite separate. There was no very frequent communication in trade. There was no mail communication. Official despatches were passed along from one governor to the next. Very little was known in Bangkok about the Lāo provinces of the north. A trip from Bangkok to Chiengmai seemed then like going out of the world. Only one Englishman, Sir Robert Schomburgk of the British Consulate in Bangkok, had ever made it.

PAGODA OF WAT CHÊNG, BANGKOK

Of these Lāo states, Chiengmai was the most important. After it came Nān, then Lūang Prabāng (since ceded to the French), Lakawn, Prê, and Lampūn. The Lāo people were regarded in Siam as a very warlike race; one chieftain in particular being famed as a great warrior. They were withal said to be suspicious and unreliable.

Almost the only visible result of my six months’ stay within the city of Bangkok, after my marriage, was the formation of a slight acquaintance with the Prince of Chiengmai and his family. Just before my marriage he had arrived in Bangkok with a great flotilla of boats and a great retinue of attendants. The grounds of Wat Chêng monastery, near to Dr. Bradley’s compound, had always been their stopping-place. The consequence was that, of all the missionaries, Dr. Bradley had become best acquainted with them and most deeply interested in them. He earnestly cultivated their friendship, invited them to his printing-office and to his house, and continually preached unto them the Gospel. They were much interested in vaccination, which he had introduced, and were delighted to find that it protected them from smallpox.

The day after our marriage, in response to a present of some wedding cake, the Prince himself, with his two daughters and a large train of attendants, called on us in our new home. This was my first introduction to Chao Kāwilōrot and his family, who were to play so important a rôle in my future life. All that I saw of him and of his people interested me greatly. During the short time we remained in their neighbourhood, I made frequent visits to the Lāo camp. The subject of a mission in Chiengmai was talked of, with apparent approval on the part of the Prince. My interest in Pechaburī was increased by the knowledge that there was a large colony of Lāo[^[5]] there. These were captives of war from the region of Khōrāt, bearing no very close resemblance to our later parishioners in the north. At the time of our stay in Pechaburī, the Lāo in that province were held as government slaves, engaged all day on various public works—a circumstance which greatly impeded our access to them, and at the same time made it more difficult for them to embrace Christianity. Neither they nor we dared apply to the government for the requisite sanction, lest thereby their case be made worse. Our best opportunity for work among them was at night. My most pleasant memories of Pechaburī cluster about scenes in Lāo villages, when the whole population would assemble, either around a camp-fire or under the bright light of the moon, to listen till late in the night to the word of God. The conversion of Nāi Ang, the first one from that colony, anticipated that of Nān Inta, and the larger ingathering in the North.

[5]. The application of this name is by no means uniform throughout the peninsula. From Lūang Prabāng southward along the eastern frontier, the tribes of that stock call themselves Lāo, and are so called by their neighbours. But the central and western groups do not acknowledge the name as theirs at all, but call themselves simply Tai; or if a distinction must be made, they call themselves Kon Nûa (Northerners), and the Siamese, Kon Tai (Southerners). The Siamese, on the other hand, also call themselves Tai, which is really the race-name, common to all branches of the stock; and they apply the name Lāo alike to all their northern cousins except the Ngīo, or Western Shans. Nothing is known of the origin of the name, but the same root no doubt appears in such tribal and geographical names as Lawā, Lawa, Lawō—the last being the name of the famous abandoned capital now known as Lophburi.—Ed.

But there was more than a casual connection between the two. My labours among them increased the desire, already awakened in me, to reach the home of the race. Here was another link in the chain of providences by which I was led to my life-work. The time, however, was not yet ripe. The available force of the mission was not yet large enough to justify further expansion. Moreover, our knowledge of the Lāo country was not such as to make possible any comprehensive and intelligent plans for a mission there. The first thing to do was evidently to make a tour of exploration. The way to such a tour was opened in the fall of 1863. The Presbytery of Siam met in Bangkok early in November. I had so arranged my affairs that, if the way should open, I could go north directly, without returning to Pechaburī. I knew that Mr. Wilson was free, and I thought he would favour the trip. This he readily did, and the mission gave its sanction. So I committed my wife and our two-year-old daughter to the care of loving grandparents, and, after a very hasty preparation, we started on the 20th of November in search of far-away Chiengmai.

The six-oared touring-boat which I had fitted up in my bachelor days was well adapted for our purpose as far as the first fork of the Mênam. The Siamese are experts with the oar, but are unused to the setting-pole, which is well-nigh the only resource all through the upper reaches of the river. It was sunset on a Friday evening before we finally got off. But it was a start; and it proved to be one of the straws on which the success of the trip depended. The current against us was very strong; so we slept within the city limits that night. We spent all day Saturday traversing a canal parallel with the river, where the current was weaker. It was sunset before we entered again the main stream, and stopped to spend Sunday at a monastery. To our great surprise we found that the Prince of Chiengmai—of whose coming we had had no intimation—had camped there the night before, and had passed on down to Bangkok that very morning. We had missed him by taking the canal!

We were in doubt whether we ought not to return and get a letter from him. A favourable letter would be invaluable; but he might refuse, or even forbid our going. If we may judge from what we afterwards knew of his suspicious nature, such probably would have been the outcome. At any rate, it would delay us; and we had already a passport from the Siamese government which would ensure our trip. And, doubtless, we did accomplish our design with more freedom because of the Prince’s absence from his realm. It was apparently a fortuitous thing that our men knew of the more sluggish channel, and so missed the Lāo flotilla. But it is quite possible that upon that choice depended the establishment of the Lāo mission.

All went well until we reached the first fork at Pāknam Pō. There the water came rushing down like a torrent, so swift that oars were of no avail. We tried first one side of the stream and then the other, but all in vain. Our boatmen exchanged their oars for poles. But they were awkward and unaccustomed to their use. The boat would inevitably drift down stream. The poor boatmen laughed despairingly at their own failure. At last a rope was suggested. The men climbed the bank, and dragged the boat around the point to where the current was less swift. But when, as often happened, it became necessary to cross to the other side of the river, the first push off the bank would send us into water so deep that a fifteen-foot pole could not reach bottom. Away would go the boat some hundreds of yards down stream before we could bring up on the opposite bank. We reached Rahêng, however, in nineteen travelling days—which was not by any means bad time.

In our various journeyings hitherto we had controlled our own means of transportation. Henceforth we were at the mercy of native officials, to whose temperament such things as punctuality and speed are altogether alien. From Rahêng the trip by elephant to Chiengmai should be only twelve days. By boat, the trip would be much longer, though the return trip would be correspondingly shorter. We had a letter from Bangkok to the officials along the route, directing them to procure for us boats, elephants, or men, as we might need. We were in a hurry, and, besides, were young and impulsive. The officials at Rahêng assured us that we should have prompt despatch. No one, however, seemed to make any effort to send us on. The governor was a great Buddhist, and fond of company and argument. He could match our Trinity by a Buddhist one: Putthō, Thammō, Sangkhō—Buddha, the Scriptures, the Brotherhood. Men’s own good deeds were their only atonement. The one religion was as good as the other. On these subjects he would talk by the hour; but when urged to get our elephants, he always had an excuse. At last, in despair, we decided to take our boatmen and walk. When this news reached the governor, whether from pity of us, or from fear that some trouble might grow out of it, he sent word that if we would wait till the next day, we should have the elephants without fail.

We got the elephants; but, as it was, from preference I walked most of the way. Once I paid dear for my walk by getting separated from my elephant in the morning, losing my noonday lunch, and not regaining my party till, tired and hungry, I reached camp at night. Our guide had taken a circuitous route to avoid a band of robbers on the main route which I had followed! This was my first experience of elephant-riding. We crossed rivers where the banks were steep, and there was no regular landing. But whether ascending or descending steep slopes, whether skirting streams and waterfalls, one may trust the elephant’s sagacity and surefootedness. The view we had from one of the mountain ridges seemed incomparably fine. The Mê Ping wound its way along the base beneath us, while beyond, to right and to left, rose range beyond range, with an occasional peak towering high above the rest. But that was tame in comparison with many mountain views encountered in subsequent years.

We were eight days in reaching Lakawn,[^[6]] which we marked as one of our future mission stations. On being asked whether he would welcome a mission there, the governor replied, “If the King of Siam and the Prince of Chiengmai approve.” At Lakawn we had no delay, stopping there only from Friday till Monday morning. Thence to Lampūn we found sālās, or rest-houses, at regular intervals. The watershed between these towns was the highest we had crossed. The road follows the valley of a stream to near the summit, and then follows another stream down on the other side. The gorge was in places so narrow that the elephant-saddle scraped the mountain wall on one side, while on the other a misstep would have precipitated us far down to the brook-bed below.

[6]. A corruption of Nakawn (for Sanskrit nagara, capital city), which is the first part of the official name of the place, Nakawn Lampāng. The Post Office calls it Lampāng, to distinguish it from another Nakawn (likewise Lakawn in common speech), in the Malay Peninsula—the place known to Europeans as Ligor. The general currency of this short name, and its regular use in all the missionary literature, seem to justify its retention in this narrative.—Ed.

At Lampūn my companion was not well, so that I alone called on the authorities. The governor had called the princes together to learn our errand. They seemed bewildered when told that we had no government business, nor were we traders—were only teachers of religion. When the proper officer was directed to send us on quickly, he began to make excuses that it would take two or three days. Turning sharply upon him, the governor asked, “Prayā Sanām, how many elephants have you?” “Four,” was the response. “See that they get off to-morrow,” was the short reply. He meekly withdrew. There was evidently no trifling with that governor. One day more brought us to Chiengmai—to the end of what seemed then a very long journey. As we neared the city, Mr. Wilson’s elephant took fright at the creaking noise of a water-wheel, and ran away, crashing through bamboo fences and trampling down gardens. Fortunately no one was hurt.

We reached the city on January 7th, 1864, on the forty-ninth day of our journey. The nephew of the Prince had been left in charge during the Prince’s absence. He evidently was in doubt how to receive us. He could not ignore our passport and letter from Bangkok. On the other hand, why did we not have a letter from the Prince? Our story of missing him through choosing the canal instead of the main river might or might not be true. If the deputy were too hospitable, his Prince might blame him. So he cut the knot, and went off to his fields. We saw no more of him till he came in to see us safely off.

The elder daughter of the Prince had accompanied her father to Bangkok, but the younger daughter was at home. She was a person of great influence, and was by nature hospitable. Things could not have been better planned for our purpose. The princess remembered me and my wife from her call on us after our wedding. She now called on us in person with her retinue; after that everybody else was free to call. It is not unlikely that that previous acquaintance redeemed our trip from being a failure. Our sālā was usually crowded with visitors. We had an ideal opportunity of seeing the heart of the people. They lacked a certain external refinement seen among the Siamese; but they seemed sincere and more religious. Buddhism had not become so much a matter of form. Many of the older people then spent a day and a night, or even two days, each month fasting in the monasteries. There was hope that if such people saw a better way, they would accept it. One officer, who lived just behind our sālā, a great merit-maker, was a constant visitor. Years afterward we had the pleasure of welcoming him to the communion of the church.

From every point of view the tour was eminently successful. Many thousands heard the Gospel for the first time. In our main quest we were more than successful. We were delighted with the country, the cities, the people. Every place we came to we mentally took possession of for our Lord and Master. In Chiengmai we remained only ten days; but one day would have sufficed to convince us. I, at least, left it with the joyful hope of its becoming the field of my life-work.

From the first we had planned to return by the river through the rapids. But the prince in charge was very averse to our going by that route. We knew that the route positively made no difference to him personally. He had only to give the word, and either elephants or boats would be forthcoming. Was he afraid of our spying out the road into the country? At last we were obliged to insist on the wording of our letter, which specially mentioned boats. Then he offered us one so small that he probably thought we would refuse it. But we took it; and our captain afterwards exchanged it for a larger one. We made a swift passage through the famous rapids, and reached Bangkok on January 30th, 1864.

The first news that we heard on our arrival was that Mrs. Mattoon was obliged to leave at once for the United States, and that Mr. Wilson was to take his furlough at the same time. This, of course, ended all plans for any immediate removal to Chiengmai. We hastened to Pechaburī, where the McFarlands had been alone during our absence. Three years were to pass before our faces were again turned northward.

V
THE CHARTER OF THE LĀO MISSION

In the meantime, with two children added unto us, we were become a family much more difficult to move. We liked our home and our work. At the age of thirty-nine, to strike out into a new work, in a language at least partly new, was a matter not to be lightly undertaken. Might it not be better that Mr. Wilson should work up in the United States an interest in the new mission, should himself select his associates in it, and that I should give up my claim to that place? It was certain that three families could not be spared for Chiengmai. More than one day was spent, under the shade of a great tree behind Wat Noi, in thought on the subject, and in prayer for direction.

Finally—though it was a hard thing to do—I wrote to Mr. Wilson, then in the United States, suggesting the plan just stated. Feeling sure that it would commend itself to him, I considered the door to Chiengmai as probably closed to me. In the meantime Mr. Wilson had married again; and on the eve of his return wrote to me that he had failed to get another family to come out with him, and was discouraged about the Chiengmai mission. Probably the time had not yet come, etc., etc. I was delighted to get that letter. It decided me to go to Chiengmai, the Lord willing, the following dry season, with only my own family, if need be. Dr. Mattoon and Dr. House were absent on furlough. Mr. Wilson and I would be the senior members of the mission. The Board had already given its sanction. The mission in Bangkok meanwhile had been reinforced by the arrival of the Georges and the Cardens. On the return of those then absent on furlough, one of these families could join the McFarlands in Pechaburī, and yet there would be four families in Bangkok. Such a combination of favourable circumstances might not occur again.

When Mr. Wilson arrived in Bangkok in the fall of 1866, a letter was waiting for him, asking him to visit us in Pechaburī to talk over the question. On his arrival we spent one Sunday in anxious consultation. He was still eager to go to Chiengmai, but could not go that year. His preference would be that we should wait another year.—But that might be to lose the opportunity. So next morning, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Wilson to visit with my family, I hurried over to Bangkok. There was no time to be lost. The Prince of Chiengmai had been called down on special business, and was soon to return. The whole plan might depend on him—as, in fact, it did.

It was after dark on Tuesday night when I reached Dr. Bradley’s, taking them all by surprise. I made known my errand. Another long and anxious consultation followed. I knew that Dr. Bradley’s great missionary soul would not be staggered by any personal considerations. It would be but the answer to his own prayers to see a mission planted in Chiengmai. In his heart he was glad that it was to be planted by one of his own family. Earnest prayer was offered that night at the family altar for guidance in the negotiations of the following day, and for a blessing on the mission that was to be.

On Wednesday, after an early breakfast, Dr. Bradley accompanied me to our mission. My colleagues, McDonald, George, and Carden, were easily induced to consent. Mr. McDonald said that he would not go himself; but if I were willing to risk my family, he would not oppose the scheme, and would vote to have Mr. Wilson follow me the next year. Thus another obstacle was removed.

Taking Mr. McDonald and Mr. George with us, we proceeded next to the United States Consulate, where Mr. Hood readily agreed to give his official and personal aid. The two greatest obstacles remained yet: the Siamese government and—as it turned out in the end—the Lāo Prince[^[7]] also. The Consul wrote immediately to the King, through our former Pechaburī friend, who had recently been made Foreign Minister, a formal request for permission to open a station in Chiengmai. It was Friday evening when the reply came that the decision did not rest with the King. He could not force a mission upon the Lāo people. But the Lāo Prince was then in Bangkok. If he gave his consent, the Siamese government would give theirs. He suggested that we have an audience with the Prince, at which His Majesty would have an officer in attendance to report directly to him.

[7]. The Lāo ruler was a feudal vassal of the King of Siam, governing an important frontier province, and granted, within that province, some of the powers which are usually thought of as belonging to sovereignty—notably the power of life and death in the case of his immediate subjects. His title, Pra Chao, like its English parallel, Lord, he shared with the deity as well as with kings; though the Kings of Siam claim the added designation, “Yū Hūa,” “at the head,” or “Sovereign.” By the early missionaries, however, he was regularly styled “King,” a term which to us misrepresents his real status, and which leads to much confusion both of personality and of function. Meantime both title and function have vanished with the feudal order of which they were a part, leaving us free to seek for our narrative a less misleading term. Such a term seems to be the word Prince, thus defined in Murray’s Dictionary (s. v. II. 5):—“The ruler of a principality or small state, actually, nominally, or originally, a feudatory of a king or emperor.” The capital initial should suffice generally to distinguish the Prince who is ruler from princes who are such merely by accident of birth.—Ed.

So on Saturday morning at ten o’clock we all appeared at the landing where the Lāo boats were moored, asking for an audience with the Prince. We were invited to await him in the sālā at the river landing. In a few moments His Highness came up in his customary informal attire—a phānung about his loins, no jacket, a scarf thrown loosely over his shoulders, and a little cane in his hand. Having shaken hands with us, he seated himself in his favourite attitude, dangling his right leg over his left knee. He asked our errand. At Mr. Hood’s request Dr. Bradley explained our desire to establish a mission station in Chiengmai, and our hope to secure his approval. The Prince seemed relieved to find that our errand involved nothing more serious than that. The mission station was no new question suddenly sprung upon him. We had more than once spoken with him about it, and always apparently with his approbation. To all our requests he now gave ready assent. Yes, we might establish ourselves in Chiengmai. Land was cheap; we need not even buy it. Timber was cheap. There would be, of course, the cost of cutting and hauling it; but not much more. We could build our houses of brick or of wood, as we pleased. It was explained, as he already knew, that our object was to teach religion, to establish schools, and to care for the sick. The King’s secretary took down the replies of the Prince to our questions. The Consul expressed his gratitude, and committed my family to his gracious care. We were to follow the Prince to Chiengmai as soon as possible.

Such was the outward scene and circumstance of the official birth of the Lāo mission. In itself it was ludicrous enough: the audience chamber, a sālā-landing under the shadow of a Buddhist monastery; the Consul in his official uniform; the Prince en déshabillé; our little group awaiting the answer on which depended the royal signature of Somdet Phra Paramendr Mahā Mongkut authorizing the establishment of a Christian mission. The answer was, Yes. I was myself amazed at the success of the week’s work. On the part both of the Siamese government and of the Lāo Prince, it was an act of grace hardly to be expected, though quite in keeping with the liberality of the truly great king who opened his country to civilization and to Christianity. And the Lāo Prince, with all his faults, had some noble and generous traits of character.

Later in the day I called alone to tell the Prince that as soon as I could after the close of the rainy season, I would come with my family. After the intense excitement of the week, I spent a quiet Sabbath in Dr. Bradley’s family, and on Monday morning could say, as did Abraham’s servant, “Hinder me not, seeing the Lord hath prospered me.” Taking the afternoon tide, I hastened home to report the success of my trip, to close my work in Pechaburī, and to make preparation for a new station, which was soon to be a new mission.

REV. DAN BEACH BRADLEY, M.D.
1872

KĀWILŌROT, PRINCE OF CHIENGMAI
(ABOUT 1869)

The work in hand was easily turned over to Mr. McFarland, an earnest and successful worker, who had become specially gifted in the Siamese language. The Presbytery was to meet in Bangkok in November. The last busy weeks passed rapidly away. At their end we bade good-bye to our home and friends in Pechaburī.

Friends in Bangkok gave us their hearty assistance. The Ladies’ Sewing Society made a liberal contribution to the new mission. Dr. James Campbell supplied us with medicines and a book of instructions how to use them. The German Consul gave us a Prussian rifle for our personal protection. All our missionary friends added their good wishes and their prayers.

We had great difficulty in securing suitable boats and crews for the journey. On January 3d, 1867, we embarked, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Wilson to follow us the next year. Mr. George accompanied us as far as Rahêng. The trip is always a slow one, but we enjoyed it. My rifle was useful in securing pelicans and other large birds for food. Once I fired into a large flock of pelicans on the river and killed three with a single shot. Fish everywhere abounded. My shotgun furnished pigeons and other small game. The trip afforded fine opportunity for evangelistic work. Nothing of the sort had ever been done there save the little which Mr. Wilson and I had attempted on our earlier trip.

Rahêng was reached in four weeks. There we dismissed the boats that had brought us from Bangkok, and procured, instead, two large ones of the sort used in up-country travel. We should have done better with three of smaller size. We spent nearly a month in toiling up the thirty-two rapids. At one of them we were delayed from Friday noon till Tuesday afternoon. At another, to avoid the furious current of the main river, we attempted a small channel at one side. As we slowly worked our way along, the water in our channel became shallower and shallower, till we had to resort to a system of extemporized locks. A temporary dam was built behind the boat. The resulting slight rise of water would enable us to drag the boat a little further, till again it was stranded—when the process would have to be repeated. After two days of hard work at this, our boatmen gave up in despair. A Chiengmai prince on his way to Bangkok found us in this extremity, and gave us an order to secure help at the nearest village. To send the letter up and to bring the boatmen down would require nearly a week. But there was nothing else to do.

My rifle helped me somewhat to while away the time of this idle waiting. We could hear tigers about us every night. I used to skirt about among the mountain ridges and brooks, half hoping to shoot one of them. Since my rifle was not a repeater, it was no doubt best that my ambition was not gratified. Once, taking a Siamese lad with me, I strayed further and returned later than usual. It was nearly dark when we got back to the boats, and supper was waiting. Before we had finished our meal, the boatmen caught sight of the glowing eyes of a tiger that had followed our trail to the further bank of the river, whence we had crossed to our boat.

One of the boat captains professed to be able to call up either deer or tiger, if one were within hearing. By doubling a leaf together, and with thumb and finger on either side holding the two edges tense between his lips while he blew, he would produce a sound so nearly resembling the cry of a young goat or deer, that a doe within reach of the call, he claimed, would run to the rescue of her young, or a tiger, hearing it, would run to secure the prey. The two captains and I one day went up on a ridge, and, selecting an open triangular space, posted ourselves back to back, facing in three directions, with our guns in readiness. The captain had sounded his call only two or three times, when suddenly a large deer rushed furiously up from the direction toward which one of the captains was facing. A fallen log was lying about twenty paces off on the edge of our open space. The excited animal stopped behind it, his lower parts concealed, but with back, shoulder, neck, and head fully exposed. Our captain fired away, but was so excited that he would have missed an elephant. His bullet entered the log some six inches below the top. In an instant the deer was gone. We found not far off the spot where evidently a young deer had been devoured by a tiger. We tried the experiment a number of times later, but with no success.

After we had waited two days and nights for help from the village above, on the third night the spirits came to our rescue. Either with their ears or in their imaginations, our crew heard strange noises in the rocks and trees about them, which they interpreted as a warning from the spirits to be gone. Next morning, after consultation together, they made another desperate effort, and got the boats off. It was still several days before we met the men that came down in response to the prince’s order. But some of the worst rapids were yet before us. We could hardly have got through without their aid.

The efforts of a single crew, it must be remembered, are utterly inadequate to bring a boat up through any of these rapids. Only by combining two or three crews can the boats be brought up one by one. Some of the men are on the bank, tugging at the tow-rope while they clamber over rocks and struggle through bushes. Some are on board, bending to their poles. Others are up to their waists in the rushing water, by main force fending off the boat from being dashed against the rocks. On one occasion I myself had made the passage in the first boat, which then was left moored in quieter waters. The crew went back to bring up the second boat, in which were my wife and children. With anxious eyes I was watching the struggle; when, suddenly, in the fiercest rush of the current, the men lost control of her. Boat and passengers were drifting with full force straight against a wall of solid rock on the opposite bank. It seemed as if nothing could save them. But one of the fleetest boatmen, with rope in hand, swam to a rock in midstream, and took a turn of the rope about it, just in time to prevent what would have been a tragedy.

At night, about camp-fires on the river bank, we were regaled by the boatmen with legends of the country through which we were passing. One of these legends concerned the lofty mountain which rises above the rapid called Kêng Soi, where we were camped. The story was that on its summit there had been in ancient times a city of sētīs (millionaires), who paid a gold fûang (two dollars) a bucket for all the water brought up for their use. It was said that remains of their city, and particularly an aged cocoanut tree, were still to be seen on the summit.

Since it would take our boatmen at least two days to surmount that rapid, I resolved to attempt the ascent, and either verify or explode the story. Starting at early dawn with my young Siamese, zigzagging back and forth on the slope all that long forenoon, I struggled upward—often despairing of success, but ashamed to turn back. At last we stood on the top, but it was noon or later. We spent two or three hours in search of the cocoanut tree or other evidence of human settlement, but all in vain. I was satisfied that we were the first of human kind that had ever set foot on that lofty summit. We had brought lunch—but no water! Most willingly would we have given a silver fûang for a draught.

The legend of the rapids themselves was one of the most interesting. At the edge of the plain above the rapids there is pointed out a wall of rock dropping fully a hundred feet sheer to the water’s edge. The story goes that in ancient times a youth made love to the Prince’s daughter. The course of true love did not run smooth; the father forbade the suit. The lovers resolved to make their escape. The young man mounted his steed with his bride behind him, and together they fled. But soon the enraged father was in hot pursuit. They reached the river-brink at the top of the precipice, with the father in plain sight behind them. But there the lover’s heart failed him. He could not take that leap. The maiden then begged to exchange places with her lover. She mounted in front; tied her scarf over her eyes; put spurs to the horse; and took the fatal leap. To this day the various rapids are mostly named from various portions of the equipage which are supposed to have drifted down the stream and lodged upon the rocks.

Lāo witchcraft was another favourite theme of our Rahêng boatmen. They were very much afraid of the magical powers of wizards; and evidently believed that the wizards could readily despatch any who offended them. They could insert a mass of rawhide into one’s stomach, which would produce death, and which could not be consumed by fire when the body was cremated. They could make themselves invisible and invulnerable. No sword could penetrate their flesh, and a bullet fired at them would drop harmless from the mouth of the gun.

But we have lingered too long among the rapids. Some distance above the last one the mountains on either side recede from the river, and enclose the great plain of Chiengmai and Lampūn. Both passengers and boatmen draw a long breath of relief when it opens out. The glorious sun again shines all day. The feathery plumes of the graceful bamboo clumps are a delight to the eye, and give variety to the otherwise tame scenery. But the distant mountains are always in sight.

The season was advancing. The further we went, the shallower grew the stream. Long before we reached Chiengmai, we had to use canoes to lighten our boats; but presently a seasonable rise in the river came to our aid. On Saturday evening, April 1st, 1867, we moored our boats beside a mighty banyan tree, whose spreading arms shaded a space more than a hundred feet wide. It stands opposite the large island which forty years later the government turned over to Dr. McKean of our mission for a leper asylum. Stepping out a few paces from under its shade, one could see across the fields the pagoda-spires of Chiengmai. There, prayerfully and anxiously, we spent the thirteenth and last Sunday of our long journey, not knowing what the future might have in store for us.

A REST BETWEEN RAPIDS IN THE GORGE OF THE MÊ PING RIVER

POLING UP THE MÊ PING RIVER

VI
CHIENGMAI

On Monday morning, April 3d, 1867, we reached the city. We had looked forward to the arrival as a welcome rest after the long confinement of our journey in the boat. But it was only the beginning of troubles. We were not coming to an established station with houses and comforts prepared by predecessors. The Prince was off on a military expedition, not to be back for over a month. Till he came, nothing could be done. We could not secure a house to shelter us, for there was none to be had. Just outside the eastern gate of the city, however, a sālā for public use had recently been built by an officer from Rahêng, to “make merit,” according to Buddhist custom. He had still a quasi claim upon it, and, with the consent of the Prince’s representative, he offered it to us. It was well built, with tile roof and teak floor, was enclosed on three sides, and opened in front on a six-foot veranda. In that one room, some twelve feet by twenty, all our belongings were stored. It served for bedroom, parlour, dining-room, and study. In it tables, chairs, bedstead, organ, boxes, and trunks were all piled one upon another. A bamboo kitchen and a bathroom were presently extemporized in the yard. That was our home for more than a year.

The news of the arrival of white foreigners soon spread far and wide. It was not known how long they would remain; and the eagerness of all classes to get sight of them before they should be gone was absolutely ludicrous, even when most annoying. “There is a white woman and children! We must go and see them.” Our visitors claimed all the immunities of backwoodsmen who know no better. In etiquette and manners they well deserved that name. Within a few feet of the sālā was a rickety plank-walk leading over marshy ground to the city. Everybody had to pass that way, and everybody must stop. When the veranda was filled, they would crowd up on the ground in front as long as they could get sight of anybody or anything. If to-day the crowd prevented a good view, they would call to-morrow. The favourite time of all was, of course, our meal-time, to see how and what the foreigners ate. Almost never in the daytime could we sit down to a quiet meal without lookers-on. It was not uncommon for our visitors to pick up a knife or a fork or even the bread, and ask what that was. “They don’t sit on the floor to eat, nor use their fingers, as we do!”

This, however, is only one side of the picture. In one sense we were partly to blame for our discomfort. We could soon have dispersed the crowd by giving them to understand that their presence was not wanted. But we ourselves were on trial. If we had got the name of being ill-natured or ungracious, they would have left us, probably never to return. No. This was what we were there for. It gave us constant opportunities from daylight till dark to proclaim the Gospel message. The first and commonest question, who we were and what was our errand, brought us at once to the point. We were come with messages of mercy and with offer of eternal life from the great God and Saviour. We were come with a revelation of our Heavenly Father to His wandering and lost children. While the mass of our visitors came from curiosity, some came to learn; and many who came from curiosity went away pondering whether these things were so. Friendships also were formed which stood us in good stead afterwards when we sorely needed friends. During our time of persecution these persons would come in by stealth to speak a word of comfort, when they dared not do so openly.

As the annoyance of those days fell most heavily on the nerves of my wife, it was a comfort to learn afterwards that possibly the very first convert heard the Gospel message first from her lips, while she was addressing a crowd of visitors very soon after our arrival. Reference will be made to him later, but it may be said here that from the day when he first heard the news, he never again worshipped an idol.

Whatever was their object in coming to see us, we soon gave every crowd, and nearly every visitor, to understand what we had come for. We had come as teachers—primarily as teachers of a way of salvation for sinners. And we never addressed a crowd of thoughtful men or women who did not readily confess that they were sinners, and needed a saviour from sin. But we were not merely teachers of religion, though primarily such. We could often, if not usually, better teach religion—or, at least, could better lead up to it—by teaching geography or astronomy. A little globe that I had brought along was often my text.

I presume that most Christian people in America have a very crude idea of the method of preaching the Gospel often, or, perhaps, generally, used by missionaries, particularly in new fields. If they think that the bell is rung, that the people assemble in orderly fashion, and take their seats, that a hymn is sung, prayer offered, the Scripture read, a sermon delivered, and the congregation dismissed with the doxology and benediction,—they are very much mistaken. All that comes in time. We have lived to see it come in this land—thanks to God’s blessing upon work much more desultory than that. Long after the time we are now speaking of, one could talk of religion to the people by the hour, or even by the day; one might sing hymns, might solemnly utter prayer, in response to inquiry as to how we worshipped—and they would listen respectfully and with interest. But if public worship had been announced, and these same people had been invited to remain, every soul would have fled away for fear of being caught in some trap and made Christians without their consent, or for fear of being made to suffer the consequences of being reputed Christians before they were ready to take that step. Forty years later than the time we are now speaking of, I have seen people who were standing about the church door and looking in, driven quite away by the mere invitation to come in and be seated.

In one sense our work during the first year was very desultory. I had always to shape my instruction to the individuals before me. It would often be in answer to questions as to where was our country; in what direction; how one would travel to get there; could one go there on foot; and so on. Or the question might be as to the manners and customs of our nation; or it might be directly on religion itself. But as all roads lead to Rome, so all subjects may be turned to Christ, His cross, and His salvation.

Of the friends found in those early days I must mention two. One was Princess Būa Kam, the mother of the late and last Lāo Prince, Chao Intanon. At our first acquaintance, she formed for us a warm friendship that lasted till her death. Nor could I ever discover any other ground for her friendship than the fact that we were religious teachers. She was herself a devout Buddhist, and continued to the last her offerings in the monasteries. I believe that the Gospel plan of salvation struck a chord in her heart which her own religion never did. From Buddha she got no assurance of pardon. The assurance that pardon is possible in itself seemed to give her hope, though by what process a logical mind could hardly see, so long as she held on to a system which, as she confessed, did not and could not give pardon. She was always pleased to hear the story of the incarnation, the birth, life, and miracles of Christ. She was deeply touched by the recital of His sufferings, persecutions, and death. Illustrations of the substitutionary efficacy of His sufferings she readily understood. She acknowledged her god to be a man who, by the well-nigh endless road to nirvāna, had ceased to suffer by ceasing to exist. The only claim he had to warrant his pointing out the way to others was the fact that he had passed over it himself. There was one ground, however, on which she felt that she might claim the comfort both of the doctrines which she still held and of ours, too. A favourite theory of hers—and of many others—was that, after all, we worship the same God under different names. She called hers Buddha, and we call ours Jehovah-Jesus.

She had by nature a woman’s tender heart. Benevolence had doubtless been developed in her by her religion, till it had become a second nature. The gifts she loved to make were also a means of laying up a store of merit for the future. She was most liberal in sending us tokens of remembrance. These were not of much value. A quart of white rice, a few oranges, cucumbers, or cocoanuts on a silver tray, were so customary a sight that, if ever any length of time elapsed without them, we wondered if the Princess were ill. And, on the other hand, if for any cause my calls were far apart, she would be sure to send to enquire if I were ill. The “cup of cold water” which she thus so often pressed to our lips, I am sure, was given for the Master’s sake.

Another remarkable friendship formed during that first year was that of a Buddhist monk, abbot of the Ūmōng monastery. As in the other case, there was no favour to ask, no axe to grind. He never made a request for anything, unless it were for a book. But the little novice who attended him almost always brought a cocoanut or some other small present for us. Very early in our acquaintance he came to see that the universe could not be self-existent, as Buddhism teaches. On his deeply religious nature the sense of sin weighed heavily. He was well versed in the Buddhist scriptures, and knew that there was no place for pardon in all that system. He understood the plan of salvation offered to men through the infinite merit of Jesus Christ. At times he would argue that it was impossible. But the thought that, after all, it might be possible, afforded him a gleam of hope that he saw nowhere else; and he was not willing to renounce it altogether.

TEMPLE OF THE OLD TĀI STYLE OF ARCHITECTURE, CHIENGMAI

During the dark months that followed the martyrdom of our native Christians, when many who were true friends deemed it unwise to let their sympathy be known, the good abbot visited us regularly, as, indeed, he continued to do as long as he lived. At times I had strong hopes that he would leave the priesthood. But he never could quite see his way to do that, though he maintained that he never ceased to worship Jesus. The only likeness, alas! that I have of his dear old face is a photograph taken after death, as his body lay ready for cremation. Unto whom, if not unto such true friends of His as these, was it said, “I was a hungered, and ye gave Me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink; I was in prison, and ye visited Me.—Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me”?

VII
PIONEER WORK

The military expedition in which the Prince was engaged detained him in the field until some time in May. It was one of many unsuccessful attempts to capture a notorious Ngīo chieftain who, turning outlaw and robber, had gathered about him a band of desperadoes, with whom he sallied forth from his mountain fastness, raiding innocent villages and carrying off the plunder to his stronghold, before any force could be gathered to withstand or to pursue him. In this way he kept the whole country in constant alarm during the earlier years of our stay in Chiengmai. What made matters worse was the fact—as the Lāo firmly believed—that he had a charmed life, that he could render himself invisible, and that no weapon could penetrate his flesh. Had not the stockade within which he had taken shelter been completely surrounded one night by a cordon of armed men, and at dawn, when he was to have been captured, he was nowhere to be found? Such was the man of whom we shall hear more further on.

At the Lāo New Year it is customary for all persons of princely rank, all officers and people of influence, to present their compliments to the Prince in person, and to take part in the ceremony of “Dam Hūa,” by way of wishing him a Happy New Year. Because of the Prince’s absence in the field, this ceremony could not be observed at the regular time; but it was none the less brilliantly carried out a few days after his return. The name, Dam Hūa, means “bathing the head” or “head-bath,” and it is really a ceremonial bathing or baptism of the Prince’s head with water poured upon it, first by princes and officials in the order of their rank, and so on down to his humblest subjects.

The first and more exclusive part of the ceremony took place in the palace, where I also was privileged to offer my New Year’s greetings with the rest. The great reception hall was crowded with the Prince’s family and with officials of all degrees. The air was heavy with the fragrance of flowers which loaded every table and stand. All were in readiness with their silver vessels filled with water, awaiting His Highness’ appearance. At length an officer with a long silver-handled spear announced his coming. The whole company received him with lowest prostration after the old-time fashion. Seeing me standing, he sent for a chair, saying that the ceremony was long, and I would be tired. The Court Orator, or Scribe, then read a long address of welcome to the Prince on his return from his brilliant expedition, with high-sounding compliments on its success. Then there was a long invocation of all the powers above or beneath, real or imaginary, not to molest, but instead to protect, guide, and bless His Highness’ person, kingdom, and people, with corresponding curses invoked on all his enemies and theirs. Then came the ceremonial bath, administered first by his own family, his relatives, and high officials—he standing while vase after vase of water was poured on his head, drenching him completely and flooding all the floor. It is a ceremony not at all unpleasant in a hot climate, however unendurable it might be in colder regions.

This was the beginning. According to immemorial custom, a booth was prepared on a sand-bar in the river. To this, after the ceremony in the palace, the Prince went in full state, riding on an elephant richly caparisoned with trappings of solid gold, to receive a like bath at the hands of his loyal subjects—beginning, as before, with some high nobles, and then passing on to the common people, who might all take part in this closing scene of the strange ceremony.

I was not in the concourse at the river, but watched the procession from our sālā, the Prince having said to me that he would call on his return. This he did, making us a nice little visit, taking a cup of tea, and listening to the playing of some selections on the organ. He asked if I had selected a place for a permanent station, and suggested one or two himself. But I was in no hurry, preferring to wait for the judgment of Mr. Wilson on his arrival. Meanwhile I was assured that I might remain in the sālā, and might put up a temporary house to receive the new family. When I requested his consent to the employment of a teacher, he asked whom I thought of employing. I mentioned the name of one, and he said, “He is not good. I will send you a better one,”—and he sent me his own teacher.

It was a very auspicious beginning. I knew that neither the Siamese nor the Lāo trusted the Prince very thoroughly; yet every time that I saw him it seemed to me that I might trust him. At any rate, I did not then look forward to the scenes that we were to pass through before three years were gone.

After the first curiosity wore off, many of those who came to our sālā were patients seeking medical treatment. The title “Maw” (doctor) followed me from Bangkok, where all missionaries, I believe, are still so called. This name itself often excited hopes which, of course, were doomed to disappointment. To the ignorant all diseases seem equally curable, if only there be the requisite skill or power. How often during those first five years I regretted that I was not a trained physician and surgeon! My only consolation was that it was not my fault. When my thoughts were first turned towards missions, I consulted the officers of our Board on the wisdom of taking at least a partial course in preparation for my work. But medical missions had not then assumed the importance they since have won. In fact, just then they were at a discount. The Board naturally thought that medical study would be, for me at least, a waste of time, and argued besides that in most mission fields there were English physicians. But it so happened that eleven years of my missionary life have been spent in stations from one hundred to five hundred miles distant from a physician. So, if any physician who reads this narrative is inclined to criticise me as a quack, I beg such to remember that I was driven to it—I had to do whatever I could in the case of illness in my own family; and for pity I could not turn away those who often had nothing but superstitious charms to rely on. It was a comfort, moreover, to know that in spite of inevitable disappointments, our practice of medicine made friends, and possibly enabled us to maintain the field, at a time when simply as Christian teachers we could not have done so. Even Prince Kāwilōrot himself conceded so much when, after forbidding us to remain as missionaries, he said we might, if we wished, remain to treat the sick.

In such a malarial country, there is no estimating the boon conferred by the introduction of quinine alone. Malarial fevers often ran on season after season, creating an anæmic condition such that the least exertion would bring on the fever and chills again. The astonishment of the people, therefore, is not surprising when two or three small powders of the “white medicine,” as they called it, taken with much misgiving, would cut short the fever, while their own medicines, taken by the potful for many months, had failed. The few bottles of quinine which it had been thought sufficient to bring with me, were soon exhausted. The next order was for forty four-ounce bottles; and not till our physicians at length began to order by the thousand ounces could a regular supply be kept on hand. I have often been in villages where every child, and nearly every person, young or old, had chills and fever, till the spleen was enlarged, and the whole condition such that restoration was possible only after months of treatment.

There was another malady very common then—the goitre—which had never been cured by any remedy known to the Lāo doctors. I soon learned, however, that an ointment of potassium iodide was almost a specific in the earlier stages of the disease. That soon gave my medicine and my treatment a reputation that no regular physician could have sustained; for the people were sure that one who could cure the goitre must be able to cure any disease. If I protested that I was not a doctor, it seemed a triumphant answer to say, “Why, you cured such a one of the goitre.” Often when I declined to undertake the treatment of some disease above my skill, the patient would go away saying, “I believe you could, if you would.”

One other part of my medical work I must mention here, since reference will be made to it later. The ravages of smallpox had been fearful, amounting at times to the destruction of a whole generation of children. The year before our arrival had witnessed such a scourge. Hardly a household escaped, and many had no children left. I was specially interested to prevent or to check these destructive epidemics, because the Prince had seen the efficacy of vaccination as practised by Dr. Bradley in Bangkok, and because I felt sure that what he had seen had influenced him to give his consent to our coming. One of the surest ways then known of sending the virus a long distance was in the form of the dry scab from a vaccine pustule. When once the virus had “taken,” vaccination went on from arm to arm. Dr. Bradley sent me the first vaccine scab. It reached me during the first season; and vaccination from it ran a notable course.

The Karens and other hill-tribes are so fearful of smallpox that when it comes near their villages, they all flee to the mountains. Smallpox had broken out in a Lāo village near a Karen settlement. The settlement was at once deserted. Meanwhile the news of the efficacy of vaccination had reached the Lāo village, and they sent a messenger with an elephant to beg me to come and vaccinate the entire community. Two young monks came also from an adjoining village, where the disease was already raging. These two I vaccinated at once, and sent home, arranging to follow them later when their pustules should be ripe. From them I vaccinated about twenty of the villagers. During the following week the Karens all returned, and in one day I vaccinated one hundred and sixty-three persons. It was a strange sight to see four generations all vaccinated at one time—great-grandfathers holding out their withered arms along with babes a month old.

Success such as this was naturally very flattering to one’s pride; and “pride goeth before a fall.” I had kept the Prince informed of the success of my attempt, and naturally was anxious to introduce vaccination into the palace. The patronage of the palace would ensure its introduction into the whole kingdom. Having a fine vaccine pustule on the arm of a healthy white infant boy, I took him to the palace to show the case to the Prince’s daughter, and to her husband, who was the heir-apparent. They had a little son of about the same age. The parents were pleased, and sent me with the child to the Prince. As soon as he saw the pustule, he pronounced it genuine, and was delighted. His younger daughter had lost a child in the epidemic of the year before, and the family was naturally very anxious on the subject. He sent me immediately to vaccinate his little grandson.

I returned to the palace of the son-in-law, and very carefully vaccinated the young prince on whom so many hopes were centred. I watched the case daily, and my best hopes seemed realized. The pustules developed finely. All the characteristic symptoms appeared and disappeared at the proper times. But when the scab was about to fall off, the little prince was taken with diarrhœa. I felt sure that a little paregoric or some other simple remedy would speedily set the child right, and I offered to treat the case. But half a dozen doctors—most of them “spirit-doctors”—were already in attendance. The poor child, I verily believe, was dosed to death. So evident was it that the unfortunate outcome could not have been the result of vaccination, that both the parents again and again assured me that they entertained no such thought. But all diseases—as was then universally believed among the Lāo—are the result of incurring the displeasure of the “spirits” of the family or of the clan. The “spirits” might have taken umbrage at the invasion of their prerogative by vaccination.

No doubt some such thought was whispered to the Prince, and it is not unnatural that he should at least have half believed it. In his grief at the loss of his grandson, it is easy to see how that thought may have fanned his jealousy at the growing influence of the missionaries.

No year ever passed more rapidly or more pleasantly than that first year of the mission. We were too busy to be either lonesome or homesick, although, to complete our isolation, we had no mails of any sort for many months. Our two children, the one of three and the other of six years, were a great comfort to us. When we left Bangkok it was understood that a Mr. C. of the Borneo Company was to follow us in a month on business of their teak trade. He had promised to bring up our mail. So we felt sure of getting our first letters in good time. Since he would travel much faster than we, it was not impossible that he might overtake us on the way. But April, May, and June passed, and still no word of Mr. C. or of the mails he was bringing. In July we received a note from him, with a few fragments of our long looked-for mail. He had been attacked by robbers below Rahêng, himself had received a serious wound, and his boat had been looted of every portable object, including our mail-bag. Fortunately the robbers, finding nothing of value to them in the mail, had dropped as they fled some mutilated letters and papers, which the officers in pursuit picked up, and which Mr. C. forwarded to us. Otherwise we should have had nothing. We could at least be devoutly thankful that we had traversed the same river in safety.

It was long before we were sure that Mr. Wilson and his family were coming at all that year. It was at least possible that any one of a thousand causes might delay them, or even prevent their coming altogether. Their arrival on February 15th, 1868, was, of course, a great event.

Not long after this we were eagerly awaiting a promised visit from our old associate and friend, Dr. S. R. House. Both Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. McGilvary were expecting shortly to be confined, and the good doctor was making the tedious journey that he might be on hand to help them with his professional skill in the hour of their need. Our dismay can be imagined, when, one day, there appeared, not the doctor, but his native assistant, with a few pencilled lines from the doctor, telling us that he was lying in the forest some four or five days distant, dangerously, if not fatally, gored by an elephant. We were not to come to him, but were to stand by and attend to the needs of our families. He begged us to pray for him, and to send him some comforts and medicines.

The accident happened on this wise: The doctor had been walking awhile for exercise behind his riding elephant, and then attempted to pass up beside the creature to the front. The elephant, startled at his unexpected appearance, struck him to the ground with a blow of his trunk, gored him savagely in the abdomen, and was about to trample him under foot, when the driver, not a moment too soon, got the creature again under control. With rare nerve the doctor cleansed the frightful wound, and sewed it up by the help of its reflection in a mirror, as he lay on his back on the ground. He despatched the messenger to us; gave careful instructions to his attendants as to what they should do for him when the inevitable fever and delirium should come on; and resigned himself calmly to await whatever the outcome might be.

The situation was, indeed, desperate. We could not possibly hope to reach him before the question of life or death for him would be settled; nor could he be brought to us. The best we could do was to get an order from the Prince for a boat, boatmen, and carriers, and despatch these down the river, committing with earnest prayer the poor sufferer to the all-loving Father’s care. The doctor was carried on a bamboo litter through the jungle to the Mê Ping River, and in due time reached Chiengmai convalescent, to find that the two expected young missionaries had arrived in safety before him. After a month’s rest he was able to return to Bangkok; but not until he had assisted us in organizing the First Presbyterian Church of Chiengmai.

In the Presbyterian Record for November, 1868, will be found an interesting report from the doctor’s pen. Naturally he was struck with the predominance of demon-worship over Buddhism among the Lāo. We quote the following:

“Not only offerings, but actually prayers are made to demons. I shall never forget the first prayer of the kind I ever heard.... We had just entered a dark defile in the mountains, beyond Mûang Tôn, and had come to a rude, imageless shrine erected to the guardian demon of the pass. The owner of my riding-elephant was seated on the neck of the big beast before me. Putting the palms of his hands together and raising them in the attitude of worship, he prayed: ‘Let no evil happen to us. We are six men and three elephants. Let us not be injured. Let nothing come to frighten us,’ and so on. On my way down the river, at the rapids and gloomy passes in the mountains the boatmen would land, tapers would be lighted, and libations would be poured, and offerings of flowers, food, and betel would be made to the powers of darkness.”

The doctor speaks also of “the favour with which the missionaries were received, the confidence they had won from all classes, the influence of their medicines, and the grand field open for a physician.” He frankly says, “I must confess that though at one time I did have some misgivings whether, all things considered, the movement was not a little premature, I now, being better able to judge, greatly honour the Christian courage and enterprise which undertook the work; or rather bless God who inspired Mr. McGilvary’s heart, and made his old Princeton friend, Mr. Wilson, consent to join him in thus striking out boldly into an untried field. It will prove, I trust, a field ready to the harvest.”

VIII
FIRST-FRUITS

During the first three months after Mr. Wilson’s arrival we were so occupied with mission work and with family cares that we had not made choice of the lot which the Prince had promised to give us. On the very day that Dr. House left us, however, the Prince came in person, selected, and made over to us our present beautiful mission compound on the east bank of the Mê Ping. He would not allow us to offer any compensation; but, learning afterwards that the native owners had received no remuneration, we secretly paid them. Mr. Wilson began at once to erect temporary bamboo buildings, and soon moved to the new compound. Since it was difficult for me to spare time for further work of building for myself, and since the old location was an ideal one for meeting the people, I moved with my family from the sālā into the bamboo house the Wilsons had occupied, and we made it our home for the next two years.

Mr. Wilson was greatly interrupted in his work by sickness in his family. Little Frank had fallen ill on the journey from Bangkok, and continued to suffer during all these months. His death on November 17th, 1868, was a heavy stroke to us all. In vain we combined our slight medical skill, and searched our books of domestic medicine for his relief. It was pitiful enough to see the natives die, with the sad feeling in our hearts that a physician might have saved their lives. But the death of one of our own number, so soon after the trying experiences early in the year, emphasized, as nothing else could have done, our appeals for a physician. Yet it was not until 1872 that we welcomed the first physician appointed to our mission.

During this time raids were continually being made into the Lāo country by the renegade Ngīo chieftain already spoken of. Five hundred men from Prê, and one thousand from Lakawn were drafted for the defence of the city, and were stationed near our compound. Thus hundreds of soldiers and workmen furnished us an ever-changing audience. All we had to do, day or night, was to touch the organ, and people would crowd in to hear. The dry season of 1868-69 was, therefore, an exceptionally good one for our work. We had constant visitors from other provinces, who would converse with us by the hour, and, on returning to their homes, would carry the news of our presence and of our work.

In the fall of 1868 occurred two events which, widely different as they might seem to be, were in reality closely connected, and of much importance in their bearing on the mission. One was a total eclipse of the sun on August 17th, and the other was the conversion of Nān Inta, our first baptized convert. I well remember his tall figure and thoughtful face when he first appeared at our sālā, shortly after our arrival in Chiengmai. He had a cough, and had come for medicine. He had heard, too, that we taught a new religion, and wished to enquire about that. Some soothing expectorant sufficiently relieved his cough to encourage him to make another call. On each visit religion was the all-absorbing topic. He had studied Buddhism, and he diligently practised its precepts. As an abbot he had led others to make offerings for the monastery worship, and he had two sons of his own in the monastic order. But Buddhism had never satisfied his deep spiritual nature. What of the thousands of failures and transgressions from the results of which there was no escape? The doctrine of a free and full pardon through the merits of another, was both new and attractive to him, but it controverted the fundamental principle of his religion.

We had some arguments, also, on the science of geography, on the shape of the earth, on the nature of eclipses, and the like. What he heard was as foreign to all his preconceived ideas as was the doctrine of salvation from sin by the death of Christ. Just before the great eclipse was to occur I told him of it, naming the day and the hour when it was to occur. I pointed out that the eclipse could not be caused by a monster which attacked the sun, as he had been taught. If that were the cause, no one could foretell the day when the monster would be moved to make the attack. He at once caught that idea. If the eclipse came off as I said, he would have to admit that his teaching was wrong on a point perfectly capable of being tested by the senses. There would then be a strong presumption that we were right in religion as well as in eclipses. He waited with intense interest for the day to come. The sky was clear, and everything was favourable. He watched, with a smoked glass that we had furnished, the reflection of the sun in a bucket of water. He followed the coming of the eclipse, its progress, and its passing off, as anxiously as the wise men of old followed the star of Bethlehem—and, like them, he, too, was led to the Saviour.

Early the next morning he came in to see me. His first words were, “Mên tê” (It’s really true). “The teacher’s books teach truth. Ours are wrong.” This confident assurance had evidently been reached after a sleepless night. A complete revolution had taken place in his mind; but it was one that cost him a severe struggle. His only hope had rested on the teachings of Buddha, and it was no light thing to see the foundation of his hope undermined. The eclipse had started an ever-widening rift. He began, as never before, to examine the credentials of Christianity. He soon learned to read Siamese in order to gain access to our Scriptures. We read the Gospel of John together. He studied the Shorter Catechism. He had a logical mind, and it was never idle. Whenever we met, if only for a few moments, he always had some question to ask me, or some new doubt to solve. When tempted to doubt, he fell back on the eclipse, saying, “I know my books were wrong there. If the Gospel system seems too good to be true in that it offers to pardon and cleanse and adopt guilty sinners, and give them a title to a heavenly inheritance, it is simply because it is divine, and not human.” While the truth dawned gradually on his mind, the full vision seemed to be sudden. His own account was that afterwards, when walking in the fields and pondering the subject, it all became very plain to him. His doubts all vanished. Henceforth for him to live was Christ; and he counted all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Him.

The conversion of Nān Inta was an epoch in the history of the mission. The ordinary concourse of visitors might be for medicine, or it might be from mere curiosity. But when one of the most zealous Buddhists, well known by members of the royal family, openly embraced Christianity, the matter began to assume a different aspect. What was more remarkable still was that he urged his two sons to abandon the monastic order. The Prince’s younger daughter, herself a strong Buddhist, told me that this was to her convincing evidence of his sincerity. Whether Christianity were true or false, he certainly believed it true. It was the height of ambition for every Lāo father to have a son in the order. If he had none of his own, he often would adopt one and make him a monk. But here was one of the most devout of them urging his own sons to come out and be Christians! We regarded it as a favourable circumstance that the patron and protector of this our first convert was high in princely rank. Nān Inta’s defection from Buddhism produced a profound impression among all classes. Emboldened by his example, secret believers became more open. Not the number alone, but the character of the enquirers attracted attention.

The second convert was Noi Sunya, a native doctor from a village eight miles to the east. He has the enviable distinction of never having postponed the Gospel offer. He was the chief herdsman in charge of the Prince’s cattle. Coming to the city on an errand, he called at our sālā to see what was the attraction there. As in the case of so many others, it was the good news of pardon for a sinsick soul that arrested his attention. On his return in the afternoon he called again to make fuller enquiry concerning “the old, old story of Jesus and His love.” He promised to return on Sunday. Promises of that sort so often fail, that we were surprised and delighted to see him early on Sunday morning. We had an earnest talk together before the time came for public worship. He remained through the afternoon, and spent the night with us. In answer to a final exhortation before he left us in the morning, he said, “You need not fear my going back. I feel sure I am right.” He was willing to sell all—even life itself, as it proved—for the pearl of great price. He went home, called his family together, and began family worship that very night. Only four brief months after this his labours were ended by the executioner’s stroke, and he wore the martyr’s crown.

The third, Sên Yā Wichai, has already been mentioned as receiving his first instruction in Christianity from the “mother-teacher,” as Mrs. McGilvary was called, during the very first month of the mission. He then received the great truth of the existence of God and of man’s accountability to Him. He was an officer living six days’ journey to the north, and was under the jurisdiction of the Prince of Lampūn. On his visit a year later, he received further instruction, was baptized, and returned to tell his neighbours what he had found. They only laughed at him for his oddity in refusing to join in the Buddhist worship, and in offerings to the spirits.

The fourth was Nān Chai, a neighbour and friend of Noi Sunya, and destined to suffer martyrdom along with him. He, too, was an ex-abbot, and, therefore, exempt from government work. He was a good scholar, and was employed by Mr. Wilson as a teacher. When he became a Christian, he was strongly tempted to hold on still to his position in the monastery, explaining that he would not himself engage in the worship, but would only sweep the buildings and keep the grounds in order for others. But when his duty was pointed out to him, he readily gave up his position, and was enrolled for regular government service. Here were four noble and notable men at once deserting the Buddhist faith! No wonder it became an anxious question whereunto this was to grow.