The same year that little Ida was born, Miss Howe and Miss Hoag had succeeded in starting a school for girls in Kiukiang, the first girls’ school in that part of China.  In this school, as soon as she was old enough, Ida began to study.  When she was nine years old Miss Howe went to America and took the little girl with her.  They were in San Francisco at this time, and there Ida attended a mission school for the Chinese girls of the city.  As most of the other pupils belonged to Cantonese families, and spoke a Chinese dialect very different from that of Kiukiang, she did not learn very much at school; but her stay in America, at the age when it is so easy for children to acquire languages, helped her very much in learning English.  On her way back to China Miss Howe stayed in Japan for several months, and there again Ida attended school.

On returning to China, Miss Howe was asked to work in a newly opened station of the Methodist Mission at Chung King, a city of western China, located on the Yangtse River many miles above Kiukiang, and many days’ journey into the interior.  During their stay there, Ida continued her studies, tutored by Miss Howe and Miss Wheeler, of the same mission.  The stay in Chung King lasted only two years, for in 1886 the mission compound was completely destroyed by a mob, and the missionaries had to flee for their lives.  For two weeks Ida, with some other Chinese girls, was in hiding in the home of a friendly carpenter, while the missionaries were hidden in the governor’s yamen.  At the end of that time they all succeeded in making their escape from the city, and the little girl, who had already had so many more experiences in her short life than the average Chinese woman has in threescore years and ten, had the new adventure of a trip of several days through the gorges of the Yangtse River.  The river is always dangerous at this point because of the swift rapids, but was so unusually so at that season, when the summer floods were beginning, that only extraordinary pressure would have induced any one to venture on it.  The trip to the coast was made in safety, however, and after another stay of a few months in Japan, Miss Howe and her charge went back to Kiukiang, and Ida again entered the school there.

Miss Howe was desirous that the people in America who were interested in the Kiukiang school should be kept informed of its progress; but with her many duties it was difficult for her to find time for frequent letters, so she sometimes asked Ida to write for her.  Extracts from one of these letters, written when Ida was fifteen, and sent with no revision at all, show something of this little Chinese girl’s acquaintance with English: 

    “DEAR MRS. ——­:”