servation has taught him that planets in the
neighbourhood of one given heavenly body have been turned out of their
course, how, and by what, he is at first quite at a loss to tell but he
has guessed and reasoned, has found cause for suspecting the planet. He
watches, observes, and compares; and after a long sifting of evidence,
he brings it in guilty of the disturbance. If it be so, it must have a
power to disturb, a power to attract; and if so, it is not a mere shell,
much less a mere vapour. It has mass and it has weight, and he
calculates and determines from the disturbances what that weight is.
Just so with the Pariah's soul. Oh, what a disturbance has it created!
What a celestial body has it drawn out from its celestial sphere! Not a
star, not the whole visible heavens, not the heaven of heavens itself,
but Him Who fills heaven and earth, by Whom all things were created.
_Him did that Pariah's soul attract from heaven even to earth to save
it. Oh that we would thence learn, and learning, lay to heart the weight
and the value of that one soul._"

And just as the majesty of the glory of the Lord is shown forth nowhere
more majestically than in the chapter which tells us how He feeds His
flock like a shepherd, and gathers the lambs with His arm, and carries
them in His bosom, so nowhere, I think, do we see the glory of our God
more than in chapters of life which show Him bending down from the
circle of the earth, yea rather, coming down all the way to help it,
"attracted by the influence" of the need of a little child.

CHAPTER XX

The Elf

"You remember what I said once, that you could
not, perhaps, put a whole crown on the head of
Jesus--that is, bring a whole country to be
His--but you might put one little jewel in His
crown."
_Bishop French, India and Arabia._

PEARL-EYES, otherwise the Elf, because it exactly describes her, was
very good for the first few weeks, after which we began to know her. She
is not a convert in any sense of the term. She is just a very wilful,
truthful, exasperating, fascinating little Oriental.

When she is, as she expresses it, "moved to sin," nobody of her own
colour can manage her. "You are only _me_ grown up," is her attitude
towards them all. She is always ready to repent, but, as Pearl
sorrowfully says, "before her tears are dry, she goes and sins again,"
and then, quite unabashed, she wi