Is there somewhere an American girl who longs to “do things”?  A little plumbing—­or its equivalent in a land where no plumbing is; a little bossing of the carpenter, the mason, the builder; a great deal of “high finance” in raising one dollar to the purchasing power of two; a deal of administration with need for endless tact; the teaching of subjects known and unknown,—­largely the latter; a vast amount of mothering and a proportionate return in the love of children; days bristling with problems, and nights when one sinks into bed too tired to think or feel—­there you have it, with much more.  More because it means opportunity for creative work—­creative as one helps to mould the new education of new India; creative as one reverently helps to fashion some of the lives that are to be new India itself.  More too, as the rebound comes back to one’s self in a life too full for loneliness, too obsessing for self-interest.  Does it pay?  Try it for yourself and see.

One bright noon in North India, sixty years ago, a young missionary on an evangelistic tour among the villages paused to rest by the wayside.  As he paced up and down beneath the tamarind trees, pondering the problem of India’s womanhood, shut in the zenanas beyond the reach of the Gospel which he was bringing to the little villages, there fell at his feet a feather from a vulture’s wing.  Picking it up, he whimsically cut it into a quill.  Thinking that his sister in far-away America might like a letter from so strange a pen, he went into his tent and wrote to her.  He told her of the millions of girls shut up in those “citadels of heathenism,” the zenanas of India,—­a problem which only Christian women might hope to solve.  Half playfully, half in earnest, he added, “Why don’t you come out and help?” As swift as wind and wave permitted was Isabella Thoburn’s answer, “I am coming as soon as the way opens!”

Already a group of women, stirred to the depths by the words of Mrs. Edwin W. Parker and Mrs. William Butler, returned missionaries from India, were forming a Society to help the women and girls of Christless lands.  At the first public meeting of this Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, though but twenty women were present with but three hundred dollars in the treasury, when they learned that Isabella Thoburn,—­gifted, consecrated, wise,—­was ready to go to India, they exclaimed, “Shall we lose Miss Thoburn because we have not the needed money in our hands to send her?  No, rather let us walk the streets of Boston in our calico dresses, and save the expense of more costly apparel!” Thus was answered the letter written with the feather from the vulture’s wing by the wayside in India.  In 1870, Isabella Thoburn gathered six little waifs into her first school in India, a one-roomed building in the noisy, dusty bazaar of Lucknow.  From this brave venture have grown the Middle School, the High School, and finally in 1886 the first woman’s Christian College in all Asia, housed in the Ruby Garden, Lal Bagh.  Here for thirty-one years Isabella Thoburn lived and loved and labored for the girls of India.