ed. Here the wives live
each in a separate house. The reason given is: "If we lived together we
should be jealous and quarrel and make our husband miserable."

I have known cases where the husband has only the one wife and there
seems to be a certain amount of affection. One little wife said to me
the other day, "I love my husband now, but if he ever takes another wife
I shall hate him and leave him."

Could one blame her?

In most cases just as a girl has learned to read she has been forbidden
by her husband, and I have been told, "My husband says there is no
profit in women learning to read and he has forbidden it."

How one has felt for and grieved with some of these women! One day in
going as usual to give a reading lesson to a mother and daughter (these
two really loved each other), I found them both very sad and miserable.
It seemed that the father of the girl determined to marry her to an
elderly man whom, of course, she had never seen. The mother said her
daughter was too young to be married, and she knew something of the
character of the man. She begged me to try and do something, but we were
quite helpless in the matter; a large sum of money was paid for the
daughter. Some time afterwards when I visited the house the mother said
to me, "Yes, Bibi, she is married to him and I have had to sit in the
room listening to the cries of my child as he ill-treated her in the
next room, but I could do nothing."

How one longs for the skill to bring home to our favored English girls
and wives and mothers, the awful wrongs and the needs of these their
Moslem sisters! But what human weakness cannot do, God by His Holy
Spirit can. May He lead some of you to give yourselves to the glorious
work of bringing light and life to these your sisters who are "Sitting
in darkness and the shadow of death." Love is what they want. Our love
that will bring knowledge of Christ's great love to them. Will you not
pray for them?

X

OUR ARABIAN SISTERS

"Women are worthless creatures and soil men's reputations."
"The heart of a woman is given to folly."
--ARABIC PROVERBS.

This is an outline sketch of the pitiful intellectual, social, and moral
condition of the nearly four million women and girls in Mohammedan
Arabia. To begin with, the percentage of illiteracy, although not so
great as in some other Moslem lands, is at least eighty per cent, of the
whole number. In East