But the ever-watchful eyes had no instructions to report on the tool missionary’s other activities, and therefore no report was made.  None the less they saw, and wondered, and thought that there was something back of it all.  There was more back of it than they could have guessed.

For J.W. had come to a new zest for both of his quests.  The business which had brought him into the East was daily becoming more fascinating in its possibilities and promise.  In even greater measure the interests which belong especially to this chronicle were taking on a new importance.  Everywhere he went he sought out the missions and the missionaries.  He plied the workers with question on question until they told him all the hopes and fears and needs and longings which often they hesitated to put into their official letters to the Boards.

In Manila he saw, after a little more than two decades of far from complete missionary occupation, the signs that a Christian civilization was rising.  The schools and churches and hospitals and other organization work established in Manila were proof that all through the islands the everyday humdrum of missionary service was going forward, perhaps without haste, but surely without rest.

When he came to Singapore, that traffic corner to which all the sea roads of the East converge, he heard the story of a miracle, and then he saw the miracle itself, the Anglo-Chinese College.

They told him what it meant, not the missionaries only, but the Chinese merchants who controlled the Cummings line for all the archipelago, and Sumatra planters, and British officials, and business men from Malaysian trade centers whose names he had never before heard.

The teacher who put himself at J.W.’s service was one of the men to whom Pastor Drury had written his word of appeal on J.W.’s behalf.  He respected it altogether, and the more because he well knew that here was no need for mere talk.  A visitor with eyes and ears could come to his own conclusions.  If the college were not its own strongest argument, no words could strengthen it.

The college had been started by intrepid men who had no capital but faith and an overmastering sense of duty.  That was a short generation ago.  Now J.W. saw crowded halls and students with purposeful faces, and he heard how, at first by the hundreds and now by thousands, the product of this school was spreading a sense of Christian life-values through all the vast island and ocean spaces from Rangoon to New Guinea, and from Batavia to Sulu.

But it may as well be told that, even more than China, India made the deepest impress on the mind and heart of our tool-traveler.  From the moment when he landed in Calcutta to the moment when he watched the low coasts of the Ganges delta merge into the horizon far astern, India would not let him alone.  He saw poverty such as could scarcely be described, and religious rites the very telling of which might sear the tongue.  If China’s poor had a certain apathy which seemed like poise, even in their wretchedness, not so India’s, but, rather, a slow-moving misery, a dull progress toward nothing better, with only nothingness and its empty peace at last.