“No,” said J.W., warmly, “and I don’t want to.  I’ll help to back up those two missionaries wherever they go.”  And his thoughts went back to camp fire night at Cartwright Institute, when he had said to Joe Carbrook without suspecting the consequences, “Say, Joe; if you think you could be a doctor, why not a missionary doctor?”

Then he asked the company, “Just where have these missionary infants been sent?”

Nobody knew, exactly.  They had the name of the town and the province, but the geography of China is not as yet familiar even to those who support the missions and missionaries of that vast, mysterious land.

The pastor thought it was two or three hundred miles inland from Foochow.  “Anyhow,” said he, “it is a good-sized town, of about one hundred thousand people or more, and Joe’s hospital is the only one in the whole district.  The man whose place he takes is home on furlough, and I’ve looked up his work in the Annual Report of the Foreign Missions Board.  Six or eight years ago the hospital was a building of sun-dried brick, with a mud floor and accommodations for about seventy-five patients.  He was running it on something like five dollars a day.  But it is better now, costs more too.  And there’s a school attached, where Marcia has already begun to make herself necessary, or I’m much mistaken.”

So the talk ran on, until the evening was far spent, and everybody wished there could be half a dozen such evenings before J.W. must go back to Saint Louis and the road.

No other opportunity offered, however, and all too soon for some people J.W. was gone again from Delafield.

Walter Drury, seeing his chance, set himself to follow up the talk of that one evening.  It had given him a lead as to the next phase of the Experiment, and he wanted to try out the idea before anything else might happen.

So he wrote to his brother Albert in Saint Louis.  “I know I’m a bother to you,” the letter ran, “but you have always been generous, being your own unselfish self.  It’s about young Farwell, ‘John Wesley, Jr.,’ you know.  I judge he’s a boy with a fine business future, and I’ve found out from his father some of the reasons why he is making good.  Now, I don’t know much about business, but it seems to me that the very qualities which make J.W. a good salesman for a beginner would be profitable to his company if they sent him to their Oriental trade.  He’s young enough to learn something over there.  My own interest is not on that side of the affair, but I know it would be out of the question to suggest his going unless the Cummings people could see a business advantage in it.  If you think it is not asking too much, I wish you would talk to Mr. McDougall about it.  Tell him what I have written, and what I told you long ago about J.W.”

Albert Drury had unbounded confidence in his brother’s sincerity and sense, so he lost no time in getting an interview with his friend McDougall.