The Love of Azalea

Groups lingered about the mission house after the service—groups of curious child-women for the most part. The question discussed from every standpoint was the seeming elevation of these most unsavory and godless of town waifs. How could these good people guess that the young minister, restless at the seeming fruitlessness of his labors, had given of his own meagre salary to induce the hungriest of the town, for so many sen, to be respectable for one day in the week? What would not a Japanese vagabond do for a sen or a sweet potato? Submit to a bath, a robe too clean to touch and the pleasure—sometimes pain—of mimicking the voice of the white man.