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1909]

Factory Girls' Home

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Le Roy, the two children, a Miss Edgecombe and Mr. Le Roy and I, went "to view the prospect o'er." No doubt in the two weeks since I was there great strides have been made, for not only does Mr. Le Roy have a good carpenter and several good boys to help him, but he lays to and with his own hands does any amount of work. I am glad indeed at the prospect of working with him, he is so active, sensible, good-tempered and trusted by the boys. Mr. Hall, the young man sent out in July to teach, has had regular normal training, which none of the rest of us have, so altogether I think we shall get on famously; we are so different in our make up and so at one in our desires to help the Zulu youth.

I have had such a nice lot of girls to teach that I can truly say enjoyed teaching as I have the past six months.

I never

Just now I am enjoying myself quietly at Inanda, resting as much as ever I like day and night, pleasant little talks at table with Mrs. Edwards, Misses. Phelps, Pixley, Ireland, Bigelow, and reading in the evening to Mrs. Edwards. Yesterday Miss Pixley invited me to a donkey ride with her. We walked most of the way as we were not sure how they would canter or trot, but it was exercise which rested me wonderfully. Some of my old girls are here, and it has been good to see how nicely they are getting on. People sometimes ask me if I have a real affection for the black girls—yes, I love them very much. I am sorry oftentimes that it does not seem wise to show this affection as to white girls. They cannot understand an outward display of endearment as our own girls do. You see I am laying in as much reserve strength as I possibly can against the expected strain and stress of next term. Five months is a long term and we keep at it from February 3d to June 19th; I do not yet know the date for closing but it is usually about then. As we are to have no native teacher for the girls, Miss Clark and I shall have all we can do "from early morn to dewy eve.”

I

FACTORY GIRLS' HOME

BY MISS H. FRANCES PARMELEE, MATSUYAMA, JAPAN HAVE never been connected with any work that seemed to me so far reaching and visible in its effects as the Factory Girls' Home, or so alone of its kind. It is a school and a home family for girls of the lowest class of society, who but for this are totally unreached by any visible uplifting influence. By keeping in touch with all who have ever been in the school from the first, by means of papers and letters, the influence of the Home grows wider and wider. The letters constantly received from the girls touchingly show their appreciation of the work done for them, and their desire to return to us.

The factory officials show every possible appreciation of the Home and its work by trying to have us take all their girls; by sending us their most unruly girls; by trying, as we had room for no more, to have Mr. Omoto spend some part of each day in taking charge of their boarding house; in giving us a small contribution monthly, and in giving us permission to go with the magic lantern and organ to hold meetings twice a week, if we could compass so much work, into all the other boarding houses for their girls-three besides our own. This work, however, has been much interrupted, first by an eye trouble to Mr. Omoto; then he had the grippe, I

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MEMBERS OF FACTORY GIRLS' HOME, MATSUYAMA

myself following suit; and, we hope lastly, by the measles among his own children. In that work we have constantly had a surprising welcome even from the boarding houses, who were bitterly opposed to us, and persecuted us at the first. All the girls in the factory have, I believe, heard uplifting talks, and are learning clean songs. In all this work my helper, Miss Hayakana, has given great assistance.

The night school for the poor of the town, in connection with our Home school, which we undertook at the request of the city authorities year before

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last, continued for about six months. It was rendered unnecessary, as the city opened a night school of its own in a near-by common schoolhouse.

The winter and spring has brought fifty or sixty applicants for admission to our Home, whom we were obliged to turn away, as we had no room for them, every nook and cranny of our house being filled. This has been excruciating, because we might with more room just as well be helping two or three hundred girls as thirty-two, and they need our help, too. Those refused admittance, or their parents (sometimes a parent has sent a telegram saying his girl was coming, so we had to take her) have urged very hard that we take them. It is their appeal, that reaching out after a larger, better life, for an uplift, for they know what we stand for.

The Komachi church is rebuilding its church elsewhere. We are to buy the old church building, which is on our land, which will give us a new schoolroom, chapel and sewing room much needed; but though this will free some of our present house for dormitory use, it will be so small that it will not materially change our dormitory capacity. We greatly need to enlarge our dormitory.

There are sometimes girls in the factory so bad that the officials will not keep them in its employ, and some whose health suffers by the factory work, so that they are obliged to stop it. Such girls either go back to their homes, to their old environment, or to the bad. Mr. Omoto says he cannot and will not give up such girls. He is sure that by staying in the Home they can be helped to better things; so we opened a weaving department with a few looms, where such girls can take in weaving, though we find that they cannot earn enough to fully support themselves. Mr. Omoto says he will pay their deficiency of five sen per day out of his own pocket, rather than send them away to be lost. Altogether there have been seven girls in this department. One girl in our Home has bought herself clothes and saved 100 yen, but her health is broken by the hard factory work. She could scarcely more than write her name when she came; now she has done the equivalent of six years' school work. She has a drunken father, who, if she returns home, will take all her money. Mr. Omoto now proposes to save the girl and her money too, by letting her weave on our looms and stay in the Home.

One of our teachers in the school, who was formerly our evangelist, said he wondered before he came to the Home why there were not conversions and baptisms in the Factory Girls' Home, but since being in it he had discovered that for a girl to be in the Home was to be saved. The object is to save the girls, and not to add to the count of conversions or baptisms. With this Home environment it would seldom be wise to baptize a girl who would be isolated from all good.--From Mission Studies.

SOM

JAPANESE CHRISTIANS IN KOREA

BY MRS. FRANCES H. DAVIS, OF KYOTO, JAPAN

OME months ago Mr. Davis and I had a new and unique experience, which was exceedingly interesting. The Japanese Kumi-ai Home Missionary Society have become impressed with the need of Christian workers among the thousands of their countrymen who have gone over to Korea. The society asked our mission if we could not send over a missionary at intervals to work for a few weeks at a time for the Japanese there, and it asked Mr. Davis to be the first one to go.

From Shimonoseki it was only a ten-hour trip on a comfortable steamer across to Fusan, and then it seemed strange indeed to have a railroad ride

of only ten hours up to Seoul. The country is mountainous, and would be beautiful if it were not so denuded of trees. The very roots of the trees have been dug up and carried off for firewood.

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The cemeteries on the hillsides interested me. The wealthy have figures sometimes, and often stone slabs for offerings in front of the mounds, but common people clear off a circular space and have a mound on it much resembling a haycock. How anyone can remember surely which one of all the mounds belongs to his family I don't see, as they all seem to be exactly alike, and there are no paths between and no designation at any of them. The people do keep track of those belonging to them for three years at least, they tell me.

A DOCTOR'S BUGGY IN KOREA

Riding in a jinrikisha through part of Seoul, I could hardly persuade myself that I was not in Kobe, and after a short walk in the Korean district I thought the Japanese quarter of the town was immaculate. The Korean streets were narrow and filthy to the last degree, the houses low, dark, dirty, and huddled close together. You do not wonder at dirty working people; you only wonder that you see so many people in clean, white or light-colored clothes. A missionary said to me that she could only wonder how people with so much intellect could come from such homes.

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I was surprised at the number of effeminate looking young men I saw, and, indeed, I thought at first that many of them were young women. They wear their hair parted in the middle and hanging down in a braid behind. It is not till after marriage that custom allows them to make that braid into a topknot. In the Christian schools quite a number of the young men have cut their hair short. Married men wear their hats in the house as well as out of it, and you are tempted to inquire if they sleep in them.

The place that interested me most was Pyeng Yang, ten hours by rail north of Seoul. We stayed in the home of Dr. Moffett, the pioneer missionary in that city. I went with Mrs. Moffett one morning when she had a class of women in Psalms, and again to the girls' school to a Bible class, and it was good to see these Korean women and girls so intent on the message she brought them.

Wednesday evening we went to the weekly prayer meeting at the Centre Church, which is a large L-shaped building, erected with money raised by the people themselves. The platform and pulpit is in the angle of the L, so it commands both arms, which are of equal length. Men filled one side and women the other, and there must have been 1,200 present. Mr. Davis was asked to speak to them, and he had an inspiring audience. Two or three offshoots have been formed from this church, taking away three or four hundred members at a time.

The church cannot hold the congregation on Sundays, so the women have Bible classes and a service in the morning and the men hold theirs in the afternoon. The building which will hold fifteen hundred is about full at both sessions. I was much interested in seeing and hearing Pastor Kil, once a very wicked man. Years ago, when he knew only heathenism, he was so anxious for light that he once decided he would torture himself by not going to sleep for one hundred days and nights. He went off to a monastery. At first he put a book on his head and when it fell off it would wake him. He would sometimes prop his eyes open with little sticks. Sometimes he would go out and pour ice-cold water over his body till it turned black. This treatment injured his eyes. He lost entirely the sight of one and almost of the other. After he became a Christian, a missionary physician operated successfully on the remaining eye. While they were preparing for the operation the church members met to pray for its success. At the service I attended, he told the women they must pray for all the Christian schools which were just opening. He believed in prayer. It was owing to their prayers that he could see now, and they must continue to pray for him. If his work succeeded it would be because of their prayers, and the responsibility of his work was on them in this way. At the close

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