h she heap gold
on the floor as high as Mungie's neck, I would never let her go to those
degraded Christians!"

Once again it was festival in the white light of the full moon, and once
again we went to the same old Hindu town; for moonlight nights are times
of opportunity, and the cool of evening brings strength for more than
can be attempted in the heat of the day. And this time an adopted mother
spoke words that ate like acid into steel as we listened.

Her adopted child is a slip of a girl, slim and light, with the ways of
a shy thing of the woods. She made me think of a harebell growing all by
itself in a rocky place, with stubbly grass about and a wide sky
overhead. She was small and very sweet, and she slid on to my knee and
whispered her lessons in my ear in the softest of little voices. She had
gone to school for nearly a year, and liked to tell me all she knew. "Do
you go to school now?" I asked her. She hung her head and did not
answer. "Don't you go?" I repeated. She just breathed "No," and the
little head dropped lower. "Why not?" I whispered as softly. The child
hesitated. Some dim apprehension that the reason would not seem good to
me troubled her, perhaps, for she would not answer. "Tell the Ammal,
silly child!" said her foster-mother, who was standing near. "Tell her
you are learning to dance and sing and get ready for the gods!" "I am
learning to dance and sing and get ready for the gods," repeated the
child obediently, lifting large, clear eyes to my face for a moment as
if to read what was written there. A group of men stood near us. I
turned to them. "Is it right to give this little child to a life like
that?" I asked them then. They smiled a tolerant, kindly smile.
"Certainly no one would call it right, but it is our custom," and they
passed on. There was no sense of the pity of it:--

Poor little life that toddles half an hour,
Crowned with a flower or two, and then an end!

We had come to the town an hour or two earlier, and had seen, walking
through the throng round the Temple, two bright young girls in white. No
girls of their age, except Temple girls, would have been out at that
hour of the evening, and we followed them home. They stopped when they
reached the house where little Mungie lived, and then, turning, saw us
and salaamed. One of the two was Mungie's elder sister. Little Mungie
ran out to meet her sister, and, seeing us, eagerly asked for a book. So
we stood in