upon children's faces, I had not gone often lest it
should shut the doors. But that last time I went, this child came up to
me, and, with all the confidingness of a child, asked me to take her
home with me. "Do let me come!" she said.

There were eyes upon me in a moment and heads shaken knowingly, and
there were whispers at once among the women. The magic dust had been at
work! I had "drawn" the little girl's heart to myself. Who could doubt
it now? And one mother gathered her child in her arms and disappeared
into the house. So I had to answer carefully, so that everyone could
hear. Of course I knew they would not give her to me, and I thought no
more of it.

I was talking to her grandmother then, a very remarkable old lady. She
could repeat page after page from their beloved classics, and rather
than let me sing Christian stanzas to her and explain them, she
preferred to sing Hindu stanzas to me and explain them. "Consider the
age of our great Religion, consider its literature--millions of stanzas!
What can you have to compare with it? These ignorant people about us do
not appreciate things. They know nothing of the classics; as for the
language, the depths of Tamil are beyond them--is it not a shoreless
sea?" And so she held the conversation.

[Illustration: This is vile enough to look at, but nothing to the
reality. If the outer form is this, what must the soul within it be? Yet
this is a "holy Brahman;" and if we sat down on that stone verandah he
would shuffle past the pillar lest we should defile him. Look at the
shadowy shapes behind; they might be spirits of darkness. It is he, and
such as he, who have power over little temple flowers.]

It was just at this point the child reappeared, and, standing by the
verandah upon which we were sitting, her little head on a level with our
feet, she joined in the stanza her grandmother was chanting, and, to my
astonishment, continued through the next and the next, while I listened
wondering. Then jumping up and down, first on one foot, then on the
other, with her little face full of delight at my evident surprise, she
told me she was learning much poetry now; and then, with the merriest
little laugh, she ran off again to play.

And _this_ was the child. All that brightness, all that intelligence,
"married to a god."

_Now_ I understood the question she had asked me. She was an orphan, as
we afterwards heard, living in charge of an old aunt, who had some
connection w