Sketches from Formosa.

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SKETCHES FROM FORMOSA
The education there is almost all carried on in Japanese
while the books provided for pupils are (in keeping with
the laws of Japan) entirely of a non-religious character.
Another thing is, that it is only the boys who are trained
to go out as masseurs at the close of their four or five
years' course. It should also be noted here that Miss
Graham's enforced departure from Chin-chiu, for health
reasons, cut off the supply of hand-punched Christian
literature in that southern half of the province of Fokien.
I therefore felt shut up to make some attempt at supplying
this lack of service, without committing anyone to the estab-
lishment of another Institution to which boarding pupils
and a staff of resident teachers would have to be called in.
A room was rented in the city as a resting-place for
the blind people who are always walking about ; and
Mr. Saw Hai a blind Church member, and an expert
writer of embossed books in the Amoy vernacular
undertook to receive visitors, to turn out as many copies
as he could of the minor books of Scripture, and to write
dictated letters to those whose names and addresses
were on our List. The fruit of all this was so far quite
satisfactory, as it brought us into touch with a number
of blind friends in Formosa and South Fokien we knew
nothing about before, and gave us a little collection of
hand-prepared Hymn Books for which there had been a
constant, although still very limited, demand. But there
were a few drawbacks ;
one being that when idlers going
about came to see that our room was in sole charge of a
young man who was sightless, they quietly stepped in
and helped themselves to any articles that were lying
about ; another drawback being that the writing or
punching-out of books by hand turned out to be both
a tedious and an expensive process ; at least more so than
the production of books from brass sheets made on that
stereotyping board I presented to the Government School.