the new life and the new joy coming
out in the faces of those who have found the Lord
Jesus."
_Rev. Barclay F. Buxton, Japan._

BEFORE putting this chapter together, I have looked long at the
photograph which fronts it. The longer one looks the more pitiful it
seems. Perhaps one reads into it all that one knows of her, all one has
done for her, how one has failed--and this makes it sadder than it may
be to other eyes. And yet can it fail to be sad? Hood's lines reversed
describe her--

"All that is left of her
Now is not womanly."

The day we took her photo she was returning from her morning worship at
the shrine. She had poured her libation over the idol, walked round and
round it, prostrated herself before it, gone through the prayers she had
learned off by heart, and now was on her way home.

[Illustration: A Saivite ascetic. Siva represents the severer side of
Hinduism, the Powers of Nature which destroy. But as all disintegrated
things are reintegrated in some other form, the two Powers, Destruction
and Reconstruction, were united in the thought of the old Hindus, and
Siva represents the double Power. The Saivite form of Hinduism is older
than the Vaishnavite, and more widely spread over India. There are said
to be 30,000,000 symbols of the god Siva scattered about the land.
Saivites are instantly recognised by the mark of white ashes on their
foreheads, and sometimes on the breast and arms, and often a necklet of
berries is worn.]

We had gone to her village to take photographs, and had just got the
street scene in the morning light. The crowd followed us, eager to see
more of the doings of the picture-catching box; and she, fearing the
defiling touch of the mixed Castes represented there, had climbed up on
a granite slab by the side of the road, and stood waiting till we
passed.

There we saw her, and there we took her,--for, to our surprise, she did
not object,--and now here she is, to show with all the force of truth
how far from ideal the real may be. We looked at her as I look at her
now, stripped of all God meant her to have when He made her, deep in the
mire of the lowest form of idolatry, a devotee of Siva. She had been to
Benares and bathed in the sacred Ganges, and therefore she is holy
beyond the reach of doubt. She has no room for any sense of the need of
Christ. She pities our ignorance when we talk to her. Is she not a
de