l bear the telling; and those who do not
know can believe it is true, and if they have influence anywhere, use
it; and all can care and pray! Praying alone is not enough, but oh for
more real praying! We are playing at praying, and caring, and coming;
playing at doing--if doing costs--playing at everything but play. We are
earnest enough about that. God open our eyes and convict us of our
insincerity! burn out the superficial in us, make us intensely in
earnest! And may God quicken our sympathy, and touch our heart, and
nerve our arm for what will prove a desperate fight against "leagued
fiends" in bad men's shapes, who do the devil's work to-day, branding on
little innocent souls the very brand of hell.

I have told of one--that little child who is now as evil-minded as a
little child can be; she is only one of so many. Let a medical
missionary speak.

"A few days ago we had a little child-wife here as a patient. She was
ten or eleven, I think, just a scrap of a creature, playing with a doll,
and yet degraded unmentionably in mind. . . . But oh, to think of the
hundreds of little girls! . . . It makes me feel literally sick. We do
what we can. . . . But what can we do? What a drop in the ocean it is!"

Where the dotted lines come, there was written what cannot be printed.
But it had to be lived through, every bit of it, by a "scrap of a
creature of ten or eleven."

Another--these are from a friend who, even in writing a private letter,
cannot say one-tenth of the thing she really means.

"A few days ago the little mother (a child of thirteen) was crying
bitterly in the ward. 'Why are you crying?' 'Because he says I am too
old for him now; he will get another wife, he says.' 'He' was her
husband, 'quite a lad,' who had come to the hospital to see her."

The end of that story which cannot be told is being lived through this
very day by that little wife of thirteen. And remember that thirteen in
India means barely eleven at home.

"She was fourteen years old," they said, "but such a tiny thing, she
looked about nine years old in size and development. . . . The little
mother was so hurt, she can never be well again all her life. The husband
then married again . . . as the child was ruined in health. . . ."
And, as before, the dots must cover all the long-drawn-out misery of
that little child who "looked about nine."

"There is an old, old man living near here, with a little wife of ten or
eleven. . . . Our present