But I am being disappointed about the music and the spinning wheel.  Not one student was willing to undergo the toilsome practice of learning an instrument, and though the spinning wheel was received with enthusiasm the pound of cotton has hardly diminished at all.  Nor will they take the trouble to read the newspapers regularly.  So that they might not feel that too British a view of events was presented to them they are supplied with some papers of a very critical tone, but I need not have feared the risk, the papers remain unread.  They much prefer the medium of speech, and are keenly interested in almost any topic on which we invite an attractive speaker to give an address, but they do not follow it up by reading.  They are decidedly fonder of books than they were, and use the library more, but their taste is for the better kind of domestic fiction more than for anything else.  There is one important exception, they all love Shakespeare and there is no one whom they so delight to act.  Whenever they invite us to an entertainment, which they do on many and various occasions, we are fairly sure of seeing a few scenes of Shakespeare acted much better than I have ever seen English girls of their age act.

The students have been collecting a fund for our new Science building, a great and beautiful enterprise, which, also, is still in its proper stage.  The drawing of plans so large and detailed has occupied many months.  We are looking to America for the generous gift which shall bring these plans into actuality, but help from other sources is welcome, too, and particularly help from the students.  They have made many efforts and reached a sum of more than Rs. 500.  Their most important undertaking was a performance of “Everyman” most solemnly and beautifully carried out before an audience of our women friends, and there was also a dramatic version written by one of the students of the parable of the prodigal son and performed before the college only.  This last was remarkable in its adaptation of the story to Indian conditions and for the characteristic introduction of a mother and a sister.

[Illustration:  THE OLD INDIA
 No Chance—­No Hope]

     “If she have sent her servants in our pain,
      If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword,
      If she have given back our sick again
      And to the breast the weakling lips restored,
      Is it a little thing that she has wrought? 
      Then Life and Death and Motherhood be nought.”

Kipling’s “Song of the Women"

The Medical School at Vellore is still without a permanent home and is lodged in scattered buildings—­without a permanent staff except for two or three heroic figures who are performing each the work of several—­without a certainty of a regular income in any way equivalent to its needs—­but it has an enthusiastic band of students and it has Dr. Ida Scudder, and so the balance is on the right side.