hrough into the sunshine, the crystalline texture of its
mauve petals sparkling like the snow itself, as if it bore the traces of
the fight through which it had come.

"And the fragile things ring an echo in our hearts that none of the
jewel-like flowers nestled in the warm turf on the slopes below could
waken. We love to see the impossible done, and so does God."

These were the sentences which we read together. To the South Indian
imagination Alpine snow is something quite inconceivable; but the
picture on the cover and snow-scene photographs helped, and the Indian
mind is ever quick to apprehend the spiritual, so the booklet did its
work.

We have two seasons here, the wet and the dry. The dry is subdivided
into hot, hotter, and hottest; but the wet stands alone. It is a time
when the country round Dohnavur is swamp or lake according to the level
of the ground; and we do not expect visitors--the heavy bullock-carts
sink in the mud and make the way too difficult. If a letter had come
just then asking us to send for the baby, we should certainly have tried
to go; but no letter came, and it was then, when everything said,
"Impossible," that suddenly all resistance gave way and the grandfather
said: "Let her go to the Christians."

[Illustration: PAKIUM AND NAVEENA.]

We were sitting round the dinner-table one wet evening, thinking of
nothing more exciting than the flying and creeping creatures which
insisted upon drowning themselves in our soup, when the jingle of
bullock-bells made us look at each other incredulously; and then,
without waiting to wonder who it was, we all ran out and met Rukma
running in from the wet darkness. "It's it! it's it!" she cried, and
danced into the dining-room, decorum thrown to the pools in the
compound. "Look at it!" and we saw a bundle in her arms. And it howled.

From that day on for nearly a week it continued consistently to howl. We
called the little thing Naveena, for the name means "new"; and it was
our nearest approach to Soldanella, which we should have called her if
we did not keep to Indian names for our babies. New and fresh as that
little flower of joy, so was our new little gift to us, a new token for
good. But flowers and howlers--the words draw their little skirts aside
and refuse to touch each other. From certain points of view, in this
case as so often, the sublime and the ridiculous were much too close
together. The very crows made remarks about the baby when she w