letters from all parts of the states, requesting her to visit their respective sections and hold missionary meetings. These letters came from California, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Pennsylvania and many other places. One modestly asked for a month's time, another requested her to visit throughout the Illinois conference. She writes to her relatives as follows: "I mention this (these many invitations) so that you may pray for me that I may be filled with the Spirit, and that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel, Ephesians 6:19. So many honors and opportunities for service are being given to your little sister,' who was seven years an invalid, but was raised up to health in answer to prayer. I feel it a great responsibility to be passed around for inspection, as it were, with the accompanying opportunities for influeneing people for good, and of helping them to know Jesus better and to love Him more; for I am sure I know Him better than I did when I left home seven years ago. You see with all these invitations on hand, if I should accept only a part of them, I would not get to you before July."

There were, moreover, some prominent members of the Free Methodist church who had for years felt that God would have their people open up missionary work in China; and now that Miss Leffingwell had fully discharged all her obligations to the China Inland Mission by seven years of faithful service, they felt quite sure that, in the providence of God, the time had now come when their hopes and prayers should bear practical fruit; and

that it was God's will to use Miss Leffingwell to accomplish the much desired result. Some of them wrote to her in China and urged her to attend the approaching general conference which was to be held in Greenville, Illinois, the following June.

This opening up of a Free Methodist mission in China was the very thing that had been on her heart for some years, and has been mentioned in these pages several times, in a very indefinite way, however. She was altogether too loyal a soul to make any such arrangements or even to mention, in definite language, the thing that was pressing on her heart, until she had finished fully her duties to the China Inland Mission. From many personal conversations with her, the author knows that, so deep was her loyalty to this mission and so great her admiration of its method of work and so strong her love for many of its missionaries, that only a sense of her call from God to open new work for the church she loved would ever have induced her to leave the service of the China Inland Mission.

She sailed from Shanghai April 12, 1903, on S. S. Tora Maru, in the second-class cabin. Mr. Stevenson, Deputy Director of the China Inland Mission, very kindly accompanied her to the steamer and saw her off, as Miss Leffingwell says in one of her letters, "As courteously as though I had been a titled lady." She also mentions that two lady missionaries came down to the steamer and gave her a card motto to hang in the cabin: "Kept by the power of God through faith."

The voyage to Japan and across the Pacific was exceedingly rough and stormy a part of the way,

so much so that one day they made only forty-two miles and for three other days in succession made but little progress. Miss Leffingwell kept her heart and mind fixed on God, and got spiritual comfort and blessing out of it all. She mentions two texts as especially given her for this voyage: "And the Lord shut him in" (Genesis 6:16), and "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of His hand” (Isaiah 40:12), and she also is still writing to her friends that "The Lord supplies all my needs according to His riches in glory," even to a small trunk key. She had lost the key to her own trunk, and this key which came to her with a trunk as a gift before leaving Shanghai, exactly replaced the one which she had lost. She needed the key more than she needed the trunk.

She landed at Seattle in May, 1903, and immediately began her work for China. The great number of invitations, that reached her before she sailed, to hold missionary meetings among the Free Methodists made the selection of the few places where she could go quite an embarrassment to her; but everything worked satisfactorily. She writes about this as follows: "When crossing the Pacific, onmy journey home, part of the way it was so stormy that eating or sleeping was impossible for me, and the thought was forced upon me: "Things are in such a condition, so many souls perishing in China and so few missionaries of the right stamp are being sent out, it is more important for you to fast and pray than to eat and sleep;' and so, availing myself of this priceless opportunity of being shut in alone with God, with leisure for uninterrupted commun

ion, and accepting it with a contentment that was more than resignation, the cabin became a Bethel because of the presence of God; and after landing everything seemed especially prepared and arranged as if affairs had been prayed through." Very soon after she began these labors, however, a very se vere storm set in, and she was detained by floods

for quite a number of days which were spent at a hotel. She recognized in this the hand of the Lord overruling her plans in order to give her needed rest.

As soon as she had arrived in the United States she received many letters from influential persons in the Free Methodist church, regarding her future work. One of these, which she had especially kept and mentioned, reads in part as follows: "I have