f his family and an
influential man in our town. He does as he pleases and no one dares to
object."

That was twelve years ago. Yesterday for the second time I met my
traveling companion of long ago. She is now Dr. Paru, assistant to Dr.
Kugler in the big Guntur Women's Hospital, with its hundred beds,
managing alone its daily dispensary list of one hundred and fifty
patients, and performing unaided such difficult major operations as a
Caesarean section for a Brahman woman, of whom Dr. Kugler says, "The
patient had made many visits to Hindu shrines, but the desire of her
life, her child, was the result of an operation in a Mission Hospital.
In our Hospital her living child was placed in her arms as a result of
an operation performed by a Christian doctor."

How did Dr. Paru, the Hindu medical student, develop into Dr. Paru, the
Christian physician? I asked her and she told me, and her answers were a
series of pictures as vivid as her own personality.

First, there was Paru in her West Coast Home, among the cocoanut palms
and pepper vines of Malabar where the mountains come down to meet the
sea and the sea greets the mountains in abundant rains. Over that
Western sea once came the strange craft of Vasco di Gama, herald of a
new race of invaders from the unknown West. Over the same sea to-day
come men of many tongues and races, and Arab and African Negroes jostle
by still in the bazaars of West Coast towns. Such was the setting of
Paru's home. During her childhood days certain visitors came to its
door, Bible women with parts of the New Testament for sale, little
paper-bound Gospels with covers of bright blue and red. The contents
meant nothing to Paru then, but the colors were attractive, and for
their sake she and her sister, childlike, bought, and after buying,
because they were schoolgirls and the art of reading was new to them,
read.

The best girls' school in that Malabar town was a Roman Catholic
convent. It was there that Paru's education was given to her, and it was
there that prayer, even in its cruder forms, entered into her
experience. Religious teaching was not compulsory for non-Christian
pupils, but, when the sisters and their Christian following gathered
each morning for prayers, the doors were not shut and among other
onlookers came Paru, morning after morning, drawn partly by curiosity,
partly by a sense of being left out. Never in all her years in that
school did the Hindu child join in the Christi