“Watch the cows well, Little Brother,” calls Arul, as she hurries back on the narrow path that winds between boulders and thickets of prickly pear cactus.  Green parrots are screaming in the tamarind trees and overhead a white-throated Brahmany kite wheels motionless in the vivid blue.  The sun is blazing now, but Arul runs unheeding.  It is time for school—­she knows it by the sun-clock in the sky.  “Female education,” as the Indian loves to call it, is not yet fashionable in the Village of the Seven Palms.  With twenty-five boys there are only three girls who frequent its halls of learning.  Of the three Arul is one.  Her father, lately baptized, knows but little of what Christ’s religion means, but the few facts he has grasped are written deeply in his simple mind and show life-results.  One of these ideas is that the way out and up is through the gate of Christian education.  And so it is that Arul comes to school.  She is but eight, yet with a mouth to feed and a body to clothe, and the rice pot often empty, the halving of her daily wage means self-denial to all the family.  So it is that Arul, instead of herding cattle all day, runs swiftly back to the one-roomed schoolhouse under the cocoanuts and arrives not more than half an hour late.

The schoolroom is so primitive that you would hardly recognize it as such.  Light and air and space are all too little.  There are no desks or even benches.  A small, wooden blackboard and the teacher’s table and rickety chair are all that it can boast in the way of equipment.  The only interesting thing in sight is the children themselves, rows of them on the floor, writing letters in the sand.  Unwashed they are, uncombed and almost unclothed, but with all the witchery of childhood in their eyes.  In that bare room lies the possibility of transforming the life of the Village of the Seven Palms.

But the teacher is innocent of the ways of modern pedagogy, and deep and complicated are the snares of the Tamil alphabet with its two hundred and sixteen elusive characters.  Baffling, too, are the mysteries of number combination.  “If six mangoes cost three annas, how much will one mango cost?” Arul never had an anna of her own, how should she know?  The teachers bamboo falls on her hard, little hand, and two hot tears run down and drop on the cracked slate.  The way to learning is long and beset with as many thorns as the crooked path through the prickly pear cactus.  Bible stories are happier.  Arul can tell you how the Shepherds sang and all about the little boy who gave his own rice cakes and dried fish, to help Jesus feed hungry people.  She has been hungry so often that that story seems real.