Once in Calcutta, and his business plans set going, he started out to find some of the city’s Christian forces.  They were not easy to find.  As in every Oriental city, missionary work is relatively small.  Indeed, J. W. began to think that this third city of Asia had little religion of any sort.

He had been prepared in part for the first meager showing of mission work.  On shipboard he had encountered the usual assortment of missionary critics; the unobservant, the profane, the superior, the loose-living, and all that tribe.  The first of them he had met on the second day out from San Francisco, and every boat which sailed the Eastern seas appeared to carry its complement of self-appointed and all-knowing enemies of the whole missionary enterprise.  While steaming up the Bay of Bengal, the anti-mission chorus appeared at its critical best.  J.W. was told as they neared Calcutta that the Indian Christian was servile, and slick and totally untrustworthy.  Never had these expert observers seen a genuine convert, but only hypocrites, liars, petty thieves, and grafters.

In spite of it all, at last he found the Methodist Mission, and it was not so small, when once you saw the whole of it.  By great good fortune his instructions from home ordered him up country as far as Cawnpore.  And to his delight he met a Methodist bishop, one of the new ones, who was setting out with a party for the Northwest.  So, on the bishop’s most cordial invitation, he joined himself to the company, and learned in a day or two from experts how to make the best of India’s rather trying travel conditions.

Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow—­J.W. came to these cities with a queer feeling of having been there before.  Long ago, in his early Sunday school days, the names of these places and the wonders of them had been the theme of almost the only missionary book he had at that age cared to read.

At Allahabad, said his companions of the way, an All-India Epworth League convention was to be held, and J.W. made up his mind that a League convention in India would be doubly worth attending.  He did attend it too, but it left no such memory as another gathering in the same city; a memory which he knows will last after every other picture of the East has faded from his recollection.

The party had reached Allahabad at the time of the Khumb Mela, a vast outpouring of massed humanity too great for any but the merest guesses at its numbers.  This “Mela,” feast, religious pilgrimage, whatever it might mean to these endless multitudes, is held here at stated times because the two sacred rivers, the Jumna and the Ganges, come together at Allahabad, and tradition has it that a third river flows beneath the surface to meet the others.  So the place is trebly sacred, its waters potent for purification, no matter how great one’s sin.