THE MISSIONARY'S AVOCATION 113 



person could buy six different things. Of course it was 

 only a half-teaspoonful of sugar, a soup-spoonful of salt, 

 a head of garlic, a few red peppers or other spices. The 

 amount of ghee or clarified butter that they could buy 

 for one-sixth of a cent was so small, I often thought that 

 if any of them should have been so unfortunate as to lose 

 it he would have to borrow a magnifying glass to find 

 it again. Before any money leaves the Asylum to go 

 out into circulation it is carefully sterilized. 



In the early days when I went over to the leper asylum 

 I would be surrounded by a lot of the lepers, fighting, 

 wrangling and squabbling, asking me to decide between 

 them. They would complain that some one had stolen 

 their food or their clothing or their cooking utensils. 

 I am sure that if I had as little of these as the lepers had, 

 I should not have felt very badly at acquiring a little 

 more, even at the expense of my neighbors. I had a 

 great deal of sympathy for the thief, but I had a little 

 more for the man or woman who had lost his dinner, 

 and what is more, I had to provide him with a new one 

 which often put me into serious difficulty. As I studied 

 this quarrelsomeness among the lepers I found that most 

 of it was due to the fact that there were twenty-four 

 hours in every day and the leper had nothing to do but 

 think about himself and his own trouble. He was bound 

 to be into mischief of one sort or another. The leper is 

 the greatest traveler in India. He is constantly going 

 from one shrine or holy place to another, from one 

 ^'Mahatma," a man claiming to be divine, an incarna- 

 tion of one of the gods, and, if divine, able to heal all 

 manner of sickness and disease, to another. I have seen 

 one of these Mahatmas sitting on the banks of the Ganges 

 clothed in the four directions, that being sufficient cloth- 



