nd the slaves came and stood near. I told them I did
not know their language well enough to explain to them all I thought and
said. But as I had learned the Lord's Prayer, by heart, in Arabic, I
repeated it to them, sentence by sentence, slowly. When I began, 'Our
Father who art in heaven,' Helweh directly said, 'You told me your father
was in London.' I replied, 'I have two fathers, Helweh; one in London, who
does not know that I am here, and cannot know till I write and tell him;
and a Heavenly Father, who is here now, who is with me always, and sees
and hears us. He is your Father also. He teaches us to know good from
evil, if we listen to him and obey him.'

"For a moment there was perfect silence. They all looked startled, and as
if they felt that they were in the presence of some unseen power. Then
Helweh said, 'What more did you say?' I continued the Lord's Prayer, and
when I came to the words, 'Give us day by day our daily bread,' they said,
'Cannot you make bread yourself?' The passage, 'Forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us,' is particularly forcible in
the Arabic language; and one of the elder women, who was particularly
severe and relentless-looking, said, 'Are you obliged to say that every
day?' as if she thought that sometimes it would be difficult to do so.
They said, 'Are you a Moslem?' I said, 'I am not called a Moslem. But I am
your sister, made by the same God, who is the one only God, the God of
all, my Father and your Father.' They asked me if I knew the Koran, and
were surprised to hear that I had read it. They handed a rosary to me,
saying, 'Do you know that?' I repeated a few of the most striking and
comprehensive attributes very carefully and slowly. Then they cried
out, 'Mashallah, the English girl is a true believer'; and the
impressionable, sensitive-looking Abyssinian slave-girls said, with one
accord, 'She is indeed an angel.'

"Moslems, men and women, have the name of Allah constantly on their lips,
but it seems to have become a mere form. This may explain why they were so
startled when I said, 'I was speaking to God.'" She adds that if she had
only said, "I was saying my prayers," or, "I was at my devotions," it
would not have impressed them."

Next morning, on awaking, Miss Rogers found the women from the
neighborhood had come in "to hear the English girl speak to God," and
Helweh said, "Now, Miriam, darling, will you speak to God?" At the
conclusion sh