indulged from
babyhood; their school of suffering has not been in vain. In the
beautiful balance of God's justice, all that man has taken from them in
outward rights has been more than made up in the qualities of endurance
and sacrifice that stand, fire-tried, in their character.

And down beyond these outward capacities, how about their spirit-nature?
It may be hard to believe at home, but it is a fact that just as the
parched ground of August is the very same as the fertile earth of
spring, so these souls are the very same as other souls. God is "the God
of the spirits of all flesh." "He hath made of one blood all the
inhabitants of the earth." For IMPRESSIONABLENESS on the Divine side,
they are as quick as in enlightened lands: I think, quicker. It is only
that as soon as the impression is made "then cometh the devil" with an
awful force that is only now beginning to be known in Christian
countries, and there is not enough of the Holy Spirit's power to put him
to flight. There will be when the showers come!

As yet the soil is dry: the womenkind are a host of locked-up
possibilities for good and sadly free possibilities for evil.

The dark side lies in untrueness born of constant fear of the
consequence of every trifling act, moral impurity that steeps even the
children--wild jealousy that will make them pine away and die if a rival
baby comes. Their minds are rife with superstition and fertile in
intrigue.

And while all this has full play, unchecked and unheeded, the latent
capacities for serving God and man are wasting themselves in
uselessness, pressed down by the weight of things. There is something
very pathetic in watching the failing brain-power of the girls. Until
fourteen or fifteen years they are bright, quick at learning; but then
it is like a flower closing, so far as mental effort goes, and soon
there is the complaint: "I cannot get hold of it, it goes from me." Once
grown up, it is painful to see the labor with which they learn even the
alphabet. Imagination, perception, poetry remain, and resourcefulness
for good and evil, but apart from God's grace, solid brain power dies.
Probably in the unexplored question of heredity lies the clue; for at
that age for generations the sorrows and cares of married life have come
and stopped mind development till the brain has lost its power of
expansion as womanhood comes on. Life is often over, in more senses than
one, before they are twenty.

The story come