against us--and any day the mother may come and complicate matters
by working on the child's affections. Also, we have heard of a plot to
decoy her away, should we be for a moment off guard; so we are very much
on the watch, and we never let her out of our sight.

By this time--it is five days since she came--it seems impossible to
think of having ever been without her. Apart from her story, which would
touch anyone, there is her little personality, which is very
interesting. She plays all day long with her precious dolls, talking to
them, telling them everything we tell her. Yesterday it was a Bible
story, to-day a new chorus. She insisted on her best-beloved infant
coming to church with her, and it had to have its collection too.
Everything is most realistic.

Tamil children usually hang their dolls up by their limbs to a nail in
the wall, or stow them away on a shelf, but this mite has imagination
and much sympathy.

In thinking over it, as, bit by bit, her little story came to light, we
have been struck by the touches that tell how God cares. The time of her
coming told of care. Some months earlier, the temple woman who kept her
had burnt her little fingers across, as a punishment for some childish
fault, and Pearl-eyes ran away. She knew what she wanted--her mother;
she knew that her mother lived in a town twenty miles to the East. It
was a long way for a little girl to walk, "but some kind people found me
on the road, and they were going to the same town, and they let me go
with them, so I was not afraid, only I was very tired when we got there.
It took three days to walk. I did not know where my mother lived in the
town, and it was a very big town, but I described my mother to the
people in the streets, and at last I found my mother." For just a little
while there was something of the mother-love, "my mother cried." But the
temple woman had traced her and followed her, and the mother gave her
up.

Then comes a blank in the story; she only remembers she was lonely, and
she "felt a mother-want about the world," and wandered wearily--

"As restless as a nest-deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away, though what
It knows not."

Then comes a bit of life distinct in every detail, and told with
terribly unchildish horror. She heard them whisper together about her;
they did not know that she understood. She was to be "married to the
god," "tied to a stone." Terrified,