hose desolate waters,
till suddenly something from underneath caught it and sucked it down.
And our very soul has gone out in the cry, "Would God I had died for
thee!" and we too have gone "to the chamber over the gate" where we
could be alone with our grief and our God--O little child, loved and
lost, would God I had died for thee!

Should we forget these things? Should we bury them away lest they hurt
some sensitive soul? Rather, could we forget them if we would, and dare
we hide away the knowledge lest somewhere someone should be hurt? For it
is not as if that black wave's work were a thing of the past: it has
gone on for centuries unchecked: it is going on to-day.

Several months have passed since the chapters which precede this were
written. We are now, with some of our converts who needed rest and
change, in a place under the mountains a day's journey from Dohnavur. It
is one of the holy places of the South; for the northern tributary of
the chief river of this district falls over the cliffs at this point in
a double leap of one hundred and eighty feet, and the waters are so
disposed over a great rounded shoulder of rock that many people can
bathe below in a long single file. To this fall thousands of pilgrims
come from all parts of India, believing that such bathing is meritorious
and cleanses away all sin. And as they are far from their own homes, and
in measure out on holiday, we find them more than usually accessible and
friendly. This morning I was on my way home after talk with the women,
and was turning for a moment to look back upon the beautiful sorrowful
scene--the flashing waterfall, the passing crowd of pilgrims, the
radiance of sunshine on water, wood, and rock, when a Brahman, fresh
from bathing, followed my look, and glancing at the New Testament and
bag of Gospels in my hand, smiled indulgently and asked if we seriously
thought these books and their teaching would ever materially influence
India. "Look at that crowd," and he pointed to the people, his own caste
people chiefly. "Have we been influenced?"

Then he told me the story of the Falls, how ages ago a god, pitying the
sins and the sufferings of the people, bathed on the ledge where the
waters leap, and thereafter those waters were efficacious to the
cleansing of sin from the one who believingly bathes. To the one who
believes not, nothing happens beyond the cleansing of his body and its
invigoration. "Even to you," he added, in his friendl