CHAPTER IX 



THE MISSIONARY'S AVOCATION 



During the Christmas vacation of 1903 I was sitting in 

 a Mission prayer meeting in the Mission house at Katra 

 at Allahabad. The missionaries were planning for and 

 praying about their work. One of the older mission- 

 aries turned to me and said, "It is always the custom 

 for the new man to have charge of the blind asylum and 

 the leper asylum in addition to his regular work, so, 

 Higginbottom, there is your job." He smiled and spoke 

 with a great deal of confidence. If I had answered him 

 on the spur of the moment it would have been without 

 the smile, but no less confidence, and a flat contradic- 

 tion. I did not think that caring for lepers was my job. 

 I remembered my first Sunday evening in Calcutta, after 

 having placed my goods in the hotel from the boat, I 

 went out and stood on the corner of one of Calcutta's 

 main thoroughfares and while I stood almost entranced 

 by the wondrous surging tide of oriental life, to me 

 so new and strange, passing before me, I was interrupted 

 by hearing a thin, squeaky voice saying, "Bakhshish, 

 Bakhshish, Sahib." I turned and close up to my face 

 were a pair of stumps of hands. Instinctively I knew 

 it was a leper. I had the idea that the greater the dis- 

 tance between us in the shortest possible time the better 

 for me. I had not thought of lepers as belonging to 



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