Everywhere this little Chinese woman made friends.  The words of one of her hostesses are emphatic:  “She was in our home for a month, and she is one of the most attractive women of any race I have ever met.  She is so charming that she wins her way everywhere.”  “She is so gracious and cordial,” said another.  “She came into our family just as a member of it.  I was not very well at the time and she gave me massage every night.  Her whole life and her whole interest is in doing for others.  And the wonderful thing about her is her ability to do so much.”  “No missionary that we have is more greatly loved,” is the verdict of another.

Dr. Stone greatly enjoyed her stay in America.  “Dr. Danforth called my appendix ‘that blamed thing,’” she said.  “I call it that blessed thing, because it brought me to this country and people have been so kind to me.”  But she was eager to return to Kiukiang, and early in September was on her way back to China, rejoicing in renewed health and new friends for her work, and in the many gifts which were going to make that work more efficient.

IV

A VERSATILE WOMAN

Chief among the gifts which Dr. Stone received for her work while in America, was the entire sum of money needed to build another wing to the hospital.  The need of this wing had been felt for years, for the hospital had become crowded as soon as it was opened.  Dr. Stone’s ingenuity had been taxed to the utmost to enlarge the capacity of the original buildings, by putting patients into rooms designed for far different purposes, and even partitioning off sections of the halls for them.  Still many whom she longed to take in had to be turned away.  Many times it had seemed as if the much-needed addition were almost a reality.  But the money would not be quite sufficient; or the contractors could not be secured; or prices of building material would rise and the cost would prove to be double that originally estimated; it seemed as if the wing were too elusive ever to materialize.  On her return to Kiukiang work on the new wing was commenced, and it was finished the following autumn.  This addition practically doubled the hospital work, and Miss Hughes wrote that Dr. Stone was in “the seventh or seventeenth heaven over it all.”

At the same time that the new wing was being built, a little bungalow was erected in the hills behind the city, where children with fevers could be sent to escape the intense heat of the summer months in Kiukiang.  “The Rawling Bungalow is finished and the children are all up there for the summer,” Dr. Stone wrote in 1908.  “I know you will be delighted at this annex to the hospital.  Of course it is only a bungalow ... but it is a blessed relief to have this place to which to send the sick little ones and those who otherwise would be left to suffer here all summer.”