teachers bamboo falls on her hard, little hand, and two hot tears run
down and drop on the cracked slate. The way to learning is long and
beset with as many thorns as the crooked path through the prickly pear
cactus. Bible stories are happier. Arul can tell you how the Shepherds
sang and all about the little boy who gave his own rice cakes and dried
fish, to help Jesus feed hungry people. She has been hungry so often
that that story seems real.

The years pass over Arul's head, leaving her a little taller, a little
fleeter of foot as she hurries back from the pasture, a little wiser in
the ways of God and men. Still her father holds out against the
inducements of child labor. Arul shall go to school as long as there is
anything left for her to learn. And into Arul's eyes there has come the
gleam of a great ambition. She will leave the Village of the Seven Palms
and go into the wide world. The most spacious existence she knows of is
represented by the Girls' Boarding School in the town twenty miles away.
To enter that school, to study, to become a teacher perhaps--but beyond
that the wings of Arul's imagination have not yet learned to soar. The
meaning of service for Christ and India, the opportunity of educated
womanhood, such ideas have not yet entered Arul's vocabulary. She will
learn them in the days to come.

Countless villages of the Seven Palms; countless schools badly equipped
and poorly taught; countless Aruls--feeling within them dim gropings,
half-formed ambitions. Somewhere in America there are girls trained in
rural education and longing for the chance for research and original
work in a big, untried field. What a chance for getting together the
girl and the task!

[Illustration: THE SORT OF HOME THAT ARUL KNEW IN THE VILLAGE OF SEVEN
PALMS]

A HIGH SCHOOL

Where the Girls Come from.

If the girls of India could pass you in long procession, you would need
to count up to one hundred before you found one who had had Arul's
opportunity of learning just to read and write. Infinitely smaller is
the proportion of those who go into secondary schools. American women
have been responsible for founding, financing, and teaching many of the
Girls' High Schools that exist. They are of various sorts. Some have new
and up-to-date plants, modelled on satisfactory types of American
buildings. Others are muddling along with old-time, out-grown
schoolrooms, spilling over into thatched sheds, and longing for the