uote from another, working in a neighbouring field,
Tamil, but not "ours."

She tells of a poor low-caste woman who learned in her home, and
believed. Her husband also believed, and both thought of becoming
Christians. The village soothsayer warned them that their father's god
would be angry; they did not heed him, but went on, and suddenly their
baby died. This was too much for their faith then, and they both went
back to idolatry.

A few years afterwards their eldest child began to learn to read, and
the mother's faith revived. The soothsayer and her husband reminded her
of the infant's fate, but she was brave, and let her child learn. Then
her cow suddenly died. "Did we not tell you so?" they said, and for the
moment she was staggered; but she rallied, and only became more earnest
in faith. So the soothsayer threatened worse.

[Illustration: Cooking in a house of the Shanar Caste, always the most
accessible of all Castes here, but this is a specially friendly house,
or we should not have been allowed to take the photo. The small girl who
is grinding curry stuff on the stone is the "Imp" of chapter xx.]

Then a Caste meeting was called to determine what could be done with
this woman. The husband attended the meeting, and was treated to some
rice and curry; before he reached home he was taken violently ill, and
in three days he died. The relatives denounced the woman as the cause of
her husband's death, took her only son from her, and entreated her to
return to her father's gods before they should all be annihilated. They
gave her "two weeks to fast and mourn for her husband, then finding her
mind as firmly fixed on Christ as before, they sent her to Burmah."

This happened recently. It is told without any effort to appeal to the
sympathies of anyone, simply as a fact; a witness, every line of it, to
the power of Caste as a Doer. But there is something in the tale, told
so terribly quietly, that makes one's heart burn with indignation at the
unrelenting cruelty which would hound a poor woman down, and send her,
bereft of all she loved, into exile, such as a foreign land would be to
one who knew only her own little village. And when you remember the
Caste was "low," which they took such infinite pains to guard, you can
judge, perhaps, what the hate would be, the concentration of scorn and
hate, if the Caste were higher or high.

But look at Caste in another way, in its power in the commonplace phases
of life. For