bandages, without having been successful in a single instance, that she did not build her hopes on this.  One day, when calling in the home and seeing little Maiyue, then five years old, playing about the room, she remarked, “My dear Mrs. Shih, you will not make a good job of it unless you begin at once to bind little Maiyue’s feet.”  But Mrs. Shih never faltered in the purpose which she and her husband had formed at the little girl’s birth, and promptly answered, “Did I not tell you I should not bind her feet?”

The first years of Maiyue’s life were unusually happy ones.  Her father was a pastor in the Methodist church, and had charge of the “Converting to Holiness” chapel in Kiukiang; her mother was successfully conducting a day school for girls.  From her mother Maiyue received much of her earliest instruction and before she was eight years old she had studied several of the Chinese classics and memorized the Gospel of Matthew and the catechism in Chinese so thoroughly that she has never forgotten them.

But as she approached the age when custom required that her feet should be bound, the little girl discovered that the way of the pioneer is not an easy one.  The unbound feet were a constant source of comment and ridicule, not only by older people, but by other children as well.  She was stopped on her way to school one day by an older girl, who taunted her with her “big feet” and refused to let her pass unless she would kneel down and render obeisance to her own bandaged stumps.  The small descendant of the proud house of Shih absolutely refused to submit to such humiliation; but it was only after her mother’s assistance had been invoked that she was allowed to proceed on her way.

Relatives and friends protested vigorously against such apparent indifference to their daughter’s future on the part of her parents.  “You will never be able to get a mother-in-law for her,” they declared.  Mr. and Mrs. Shih felt, no doubt, that this was true; for who could have then prophesied that the time would so soon come in conservative old China when young men would not only be willing to marry girls with natural feet, but would decidedly prefer them!  Maiyue’s father and mother never reconsidered their decision that their daughter should grow to womanhood with natural feet; but they did try to devise some plan by which her life might be a useful and happy one, even though she might never enjoy the blessing of a mother-in-law.  They were very much impressed with the service which Dr. Kate Bushnell was rendering the suffering women and children of Kiukiang, and when Maiyue was eight years old her father took her to Dr. Bushnell and announced, “Here is my little girl.  I want you to make a doctor of her.”

This was almost as startling as the unbound feet!  A Chinese woman physician was unknown and undreamed of.  But this young father’s faith in the possibilities of Chinese womanhood was not to be discouraged.  The necessity of general education, preliminary to medical training, was explained, and Maiyue was put in charge of Miss Howe, then at the head of the Girls’ Boarding School of the Methodist Mission.  In this school she spent most of the next ten years of her life, studying in both Chinese and English, and fitting herself under Miss Howe’s direction for her medical course.