Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/441

Rh ordained missionaries of the American Board of Foreign Missions who left America thirty-five and thirty-eight years since; nor are they behind their younger brethren in the zeal and constancy of their labours. Experience shows that the greater part of those who prove unable to endure the climate fail within five or six years after their arrival. If this period be past without serious loss of health, the prospect for labouring many years is very good. Our young men therefore need not look forward to a mission to India as a certain means of shortening life; nor should parents feel that sending their children thither is consigning them to an early grave.

It was our lot to prove of the number of those ill adapted to withstand the influences of an Indian climate. Again and again did sickness visit us, until there was little hope of a recovery of health and strength without a resort to a cooler climate. It was decided that we should visit the range of mountains known as the, to seek, in their more bracing atmosphere, a corrective for the weak-