apter we have spoken of the Hindu girl as yet untouched by
Christianity, save as such influence may have filtered through into the
general life of the nation. We have had vague glimpses of her social
inheritance, with its traditions of an ancient and honorable estate of
womanhood; of the limitations of her life to-day; of her half-formed
aspirations for the future.

Of education as such nothing has been said. As we turn now from home to
school life, we shall turn also from the Hindu community to the
Christian. This does not mean that none but Christian girls go to
school. In all the larger and more advanced cities and in some towns you
will find Government schools for Hindu girls as well as those carried on
by private enterprise, some of them of great efficiency. Yet this
deliberate turning to the school life of the Christian community is not
so arbitrary as it seems.

In the first place, the proportion of literacy among Christian women is
far higher than among the Hindu and Muhammadan communities. Again,
because a large proportion of Christians have come from the depressed
classes, the "submerged tenth," ground for uncounted centuries under the
heel of the caste system, their education is also a study in social
uplift, one of the biggest sociological laboratory experiments to be
found anywhere on earth. And, lastly, it is through Christian schools
that the girls and women of America have reached out hands across the
sea and gripped their sisters of the East.

The School under the Palm Trees.

"And the dawn comes up like thunder Outer China 'cross the Bay." Far
from China and far inland from the Bay is this South Indian village, but
the dawn flashes up with the same amazing swiftness. Life's daily
resurrection proceeds rapidly in the Village of the Seven Palms. Flocks
of crows are swarming in from their roosting place in the palmyra jungle
beside the dry sand river; the cattle are strolling out from behind
various enclosures where they share the family shelter; all around is
the whirr of bird and insect as the teeming life of the tropics wakes to
greet "my lord Sun."

Under the thatch of each mud-walled hovel of the outcaste village there
is the same stir of the returning day. Sheeted corpses stretched on the
floor suddenly come to life and the babel of village gossip begins.

In the house at the far end of the street, Arul is first on her feet,
first to rub the sleep from her eyes. There is no ceremony of dress