she flew to the temple, slipped past
the Brahmans, crossed the court, stood before the god in the dim
half-darkness of the shrine, clasped her hands,--she showed us
how,--prayed to it, pleaded, "Let me die! Oh, let me die!" Barely seven
years old, and she prayed, "Oh, let me die!"

She tried to run away again; if she had come to our village then, she
could not have been saved. We were in Dohnavur, and there was no one
here who could have protected her against the temple people. So God kept
her from coming then.

About that time, one afternoon one of our Tamil Sisters, whom we had
left behind to hold the fort, passed through the Great Lake Village, and
the temple women called the child, and said, "See! It is she! The
child-stealing Ammal! Run!" It was only said to frighten her, but it did
a different work. One day, _the day after we returned_, the thought
suddenly came to her, "I will go and look for that child-stealing
Ammal"; and she wandered away in the twilight and came to our village,
and stood alone in front of the church, and no one knew.

There one of our Christian women, Servant of Jesus by name, found her
some time afterwards, a very small and desolate mite, with tumbled hair
and troubled eyes, for she could not find the one she sought, that
child-stealing Ammal she wanted so much, and she was frightened, all
alone in the gathering dark by this big, big church; and very big it
must have looked to so tiny a thing as she.

Servant of Jesus thought at first of taking the little one back to her
home, but mercifully it was late (another touch of the hand of God), and
so instead she took her straight to her own little house, which
satisfied Pearl-eyes perfectly. But she would not touch the curry and
rice the kind woman offered her. She drew herself up to her full small
height and said, with the greatest dignity, "Am I not a Vellala child?
May you ask me to break my Caste?"

So Servant of Jesus gave her some sugar, that being ceremonially safe,
and Pearl-eyes ate it hungrily, and then went off to sleep.

Next morning, again the woman's first thought was to take her to her own
people. But the child was so insistent that she wanted the
child-catching Ammal, that Servant of Jesus, thinking I was the Ammal
she meant (for this is one of my various names), brought her to me, as I
have said, and oh, I am glad she did!

Nothing escapes those clear brown eyes. That morning, in the midst of
the confusion, one of the tem