How it was our great pleasure to write your noble personage.  When I triumphed to my native home after speaking last lesson before your honorable face, my knowledge was informed by rumors of gossip that in most hateful place in city of Hijiyama was American lady.  She wear name of Miss Jaygray.  Who have affliction of kind heart and very bad health.  Also she have white hair and no medicine.  Street she live in have also Japanese gentlemans what kill and steal and even lie.  Very bad for lady who have nice thought for gentlemans, and speak many words about Christians God.  Now not one word can she speak.  Her sicker too great.  Your great country say “Unions is strong and we stand together till divided by falling out.”  Please union with lady countryman and also divide.  She very tired.  I think little hungry too.

                                                   Yours verily
          
                                                  Takata.

(Some little more.) Go down House of Flying-Sparrow Street and discover Tube-Rose Lane.  There maybe you see policeman.  He whistle his two partner.  Hand in hand they show you bad gentlemens street where lives sick ladys mansion.

I hastened at once to the succor of my sick countrywoman.  The way led through streets obscure and ill-kept, the inhabitants covertly seeking shelter as the policemen and I approached.  It was a section I knew to be the rendezvous of outcasts of this and neighboring cities.  It was a place where the bravest officer never went alone.  For making a last stand for the right to their pitiful sordid lives, the criminals herded together in one desperate band when danger threatened any of the brotherhood.  The very stillness of the streets bespoke hidden iniquity.  Every house presented a closed front.  Surely, I thought, ignorance of conditions could be the only excuse for any woman of any creed choosing to live in such surroundings as these.

In the cleanest of the hovels I found Miss Gray, her middle-aged figure shrunken to the proportions of a child.  There was no difficulty in finding the cause of her illness.  She was half-starved.  Her reason for being in that section was as senseless as it was mistaken, except to one whose heart had been fired by a passion for saving souls.  After being revived by a stimulant from my emergency kit, she told me her name, which I already knew, that she was an American and her calling that of a missionary.  I thought I knew every type of the profession and I was proud to call many of them my friends, but Miss Gray was an original model, peculiar in quality and indefinite in pattern.

“Does your Mission Board give you permission to live in a place or fashion like this?” I asked sternly.

“Haven’t any Board,” she answered weakly.  “I’m an Independent.”

“Independent what?” I demanded.

“Independent Daughter of Hope.”