of men, we
found more friendliness; they let us sit on one end of the narrow
verandah fronts, and quite a number of women clustered about on the
other. They were greatly afraid of defilement there, and would not come
too close. And they had the strangest ideas about us. They were sure we
had a powder which, if they inhaled it, would compel them to be
Christians. They had heard that we went round "calling children," that
is, beckoning them, and drawing them to follow after us, and that we
were paid so much a head for converts. It takes a whole afternoon
sometimes simply to disabuse their minds of such misconceptions.

I heard this commercial aspect of things explained by one who apparently
knew. A kindly old Brahman woman had allowed us to sit on her doorstep
out of the sun, and bit by bit we had worked our way to the end of the
verandah, which was a little more shaded, where a girl was sitting alone
who seemed to want to hear. The old woman sat down behind us, and then
an old man came up, and the two began to talk. Said the old woman to the
old man, "She is trying to make us join her Way." (I had carefully
abstained from any such expression.) The old man agreed that such was
my probable object. "What will she get if we join? Do you know?" "Oh
yes; do I not know! For one of us a thousand rupees, and for a Vellalar
five hundred. She even gets something for a low-caste child, but she
gets a whole thousand for one of us!"

[Illustration: A Shepherd-Caste house of the better sort. We would give
a great deal to get into this house, but so far it is closed. You can
see straight through to the back courtyard where the women are, where we
may not go. The old man is typical of his class, a thoughtful man of
refinement of mind, but wholly indifferent to the teaching.]

They were both very interested in this conversation, and so indeed was
I, and I thought I would further enlighten them, when the old woman got
up in a hurry and hobbled into the house. After that, whenever we
passed, she used to shake her head at us, and say, "Chee, chee!" No
persuasions could ever induce her to let us sit on her doorstep again.
We were clearly after that thousand rupees, and she would have none of
us.

In the same village there was a little Brahman child who often tried to
speak to us, but never was allowed. One day she risked capture and its
consequences, and ran across the narrow stream which divides the Brahman
street from the village, and