ot a tree, and someone
tells you it was struck in the last great thunderstorm.

Next time we saw Treasure she was like that. What happened between, so
far as it is known, was this. They tried to persuade her, they tried to
coerce her; she witnessed to Jesus, and never faltered, though once they
dragged her out of the house by her hair, and holding her down against
the wall, struck her hard with a leather strap. One of the Christians
saw it, and heard the poor tortured child cry out, "I do not fear! I do
not fear! It will only send me to Jesus!"

Then they tried threats. "We will take you out to the lake at night, and
cut you in little pieces, and throw you into it." She fully believed
them, but even so, we hear she did not flinch.

Then they did their worst to her.

It was a Sunday morning. The Saturday evening before she had managed to
see the teacher. She told her hurriedly how one had come, "a bridegroom"
she called him, a student from a Mission College; he was telling her
all sorts of things--that Christianity was an exploded religion; and how
a great and learned woman (Mrs. Besant) had exposed the missionaries and
their ways, so that no thinking people had any excuse for being deceived
by them.

Then she added earnestly, "It is the devil. Do pray for me. They want me
to marry him secretly! Oh, I must go to the Missie Ammal!" And if we had
only known, we would have risked anything, any breach of the law of the
land, to save her from a breach of the law of heaven! For all this talk,
between an Indian girl of good repute and her prospective husband, is
utterly foreign to what is considered right in Old India. It in itself
meant danger. But we knew nothing, and next day, all that Sunday, she
was shut up, and no one knows what happened to her. On Monday she was
seen again; but changed, so utterly changed!

We heard nothing of this till the following Wednesday. The Christians
were honestly concerned, but the Tamil is ever casual, and they saw no
reason for distressing us with bad news sooner than could be helped.

As soon as we heard, I sent two of the Sisters who knew her best, to try
and see her if possible. They managed to see her for two or three
minutes, but found her hopelessly hard. Every bit of care was gone. She
laughed in a queer, strained way, they said. It was no use my trying to
see her. But I determined to see her. I cannot go over it all again, it
is like tearing the skin off a wound; so the letter