Christmas in Our Boys' School, Junghsien, West China
By Edward Wilson Wallace, B.A., B.D.
If you were a Chinese, and every day ate two meals
of rice and some vegetables, with meat only twice a
month, if as often; if you worked from daylight to
dark seven days in the week, and had no summer
vacation or Christmas holidays; if you had no books
to read except possibly (if you were lucky) one or
two greasy and tattered volumes of ancient philosophy,
not one word of which you understood; in other words,
if you were an average Chinese boy or girl, don't you
think that you would look forward even more eagerly
than you did this year to Christmas? I think you
would. At any rate the boys and girls connected with
the church in Junghsien were expecting a great treat,
and we were planning to give them all that they expected,
and more.
Then suddenly, unexpectedly, a terrible thing happened that put an end to all these hopes and plans. Can you guess what it was? It was not a fire, or an earthquake, or a riot on the mission. But one morning there came word that the Emperor of China and his
