The years pass over Arul’s head, leaving her a little taller, a little fleeter of foot as she hurries back from the pasture, a little wiser in the ways of God and men.  Still her father holds out against the inducements of child labor.  Arul shall go to school as long as there is anything left for her to learn.  And into Arul’s eyes there has come the gleam of a great ambition.  She will leave the Village of the Seven Palms and go into the wide world.  The most spacious existence she knows of is represented by the Girls’ Boarding School in the town twenty miles away.  To enter that school, to study, to become a teacher perhaps—­but beyond that the wings of Arul’s imagination have not yet learned to soar.  The meaning of service for Christ and India, the opportunity of educated womanhood, such ideas have not yet entered Arul’s vocabulary.  She will learn them in the days to come.

Countless villages of the Seven Palms; countless schools badly equipped and poorly taught; countless Aruls—­feeling within them dim gropings, half-formed ambitions.  Somewhere in America there are girls trained in rural education and longing for the chance for research and original work in a big, untried field.  What a chance for getting together the girl and the task!

[Illustration:  The sort of home that Arul knew in the village of seven palms]

A HIGH SCHOOL

Where the Girls Come from.

If the girls of India could pass you in long procession, you would need to count up to one hundred before you found one who had had Arul’s opportunity of learning just to read and write.  Infinitely smaller is the proportion of those who go into secondary schools.  American women have been responsible for founding, financing, and teaching many of the Girls’ High Schools that exist.  They are of various sorts.  Some have new and up-to-date plants, modelled on satisfactory types of American buildings.  Others are muddling along with old-time, out-grown schoolrooms, spilling over into thatched sheds, and longing for the day when the spiritual structure they are erecting will be expressed in a suitable material form.  Schools vary also as to social standing, discipline, and ideals; yet there are common features and problems, and one may be more or less typical of all.  Most include under one organization everything from kindergarten to senior high school, so that the school is really a big family of one or two or four hundred, as the case may be.

The girls come from many grades of Indian life.  The great majority are Christians, for few Hindu parents are yet sufficiently “advanced” to desire a high school education for their daughters, and those who do usually send their girls to a Government school where caste regulations will be observed and where there will be no religious teaching.