easy to
grow accustomed to things, easy to get cool. We pray not only for those
at home, who as yet are not awake to feel the eloquence and the
piteousness of the great "voiceless silence" of these lands, but we pray
for ourselves with ever deepening intensity:--
Oh for a love, for a burning love, like the fervent flame of fire!
Oh for a love, for a yearning love, that will never, never tire!
Lord, in my need I appeal unto Thee;
Oh, give me my heart's desire!
CHAPTER VII
How the Children Come
THEY come in many ways through the help of many friends. We have told
before[A] how our first two babies came to us through two pastors, one
in the north, the other in the south of our district. Since then many
Indian pastors and workers, and several warm-hearted Christian
apothecaries and nurses in Government service, have become interested;
with the result that little children who must otherwise have perished
have been saved.
One little babe, who has since become one of our very dearest, was
redeemed from Temple life by the wife of a leading pastor, who was
wonderfully brought to the very place where the little child was waiting
for the arrival of the Temple people. We have seldom known a more
definite leading. "I being in the way, the Lord led me," was surely true
of that friend that day, and of other Indian sisters who helped her.
Later, when she came to stay with us, she told us about it. "When first
I heard of this new work, I was not in sympathy with it. I even talked
against it to others. But when I saw that little babe, so innocent and
helpless, and so beautiful too, then all my heart went out to it. And
now----" Tears filled her eyes. She could not finish her sentence. Nor
was there any need; the loving Indian heart had been won.
My mother was with us when this baby came; and she adopted her as her
own from the first, and always had the little basket in which the baby
slept put by her bedside. When the mosquitoes began to be troublesome,
the basket was slipped under her own mosquito net, lest the little pink
blossom should be disturbed. But the baby did not thrive at first; and
the pink, instead of passing into buff, began to fade into something too
near ivory for our peace of mind. It was then the friend who had saved
the little one came to stay with us; and she proposed taking her and her
nurse out to her country village, in hopes of getting a foster-mother
for
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