Mimosa

THIS story is true. It tells the eternally newtale of the matchless charm of our Lord JesusChrist. One look at that loveliness, and, thoughthe one who looked did not even remember Hisname, she was His for ever.The story came to us at a time of disappoint-ment and temptation to downheartedness. Andmightily it cheered us. It spoke in a clear, gladvoice, and it said : " Fear not at all. Where yourhands cannot reach and your love cannot help,His hands can reach and His love can help. Sowhy are you afraid?"And it said that miles of space and solid wallsand locked doors are nothing to Love. Nothingat all.And it said-and we set it down with a greathope that it may cheer some other, for it said itvery earnestly : " The seed is not your poor littleword. The seed is the Word of God."

ONE day, about a year ago, two of us went toMimosa's village, and I stayed with her. I sawthen, for the first time, the room mentioned inChapter IX. It is narrow and low and airless,and when the small, heavy door is shut it is quitedark. It is the only place where Mimosa can bealone.Is her story true ? Although the foreword saidit was, some have wondered if it could be so.When first I went into that room I stood aston-ished. In the dark corners I could see the dimshapes of huddled-up sacks and a pot or two. Itwas unbelievably stuffy. I could hardly breathe.Almost my heart questioned then the things thatI had heard. Can it be here, 0 Lord of life andlight and liberty, that Thou didst meet her sooften? Can such dinginess be indeed the placeof Thy Presence ?She was out busy cooking in the verandah thatran round the little courtyard at the time. Shethought I would like the door shut. "And whenthou hast shut thy door " has always been one ofher words, so she softly shut the door. Then nota breath of air came in and not a ray of light. Inthat hot darkness I stood, and thought of theangels ascending and descending-not on someladder set up under the stars, but here, in thisstrip of room. ..." Take off thy shoes from offthy feet, for the place whereon thou standest isholy ground."And a new insight, like the sudden flash thatsometimes lights the evening sky in these tropicallands and shows kingdoms beyond the clouds,was granted in that moment. I knew, not by faithnow, but as it were by sight, that our Lord JesusChrist can do anything, keep anyone, shine any-where, succour in spite of all the forces of theenemy, comfort in any circumstances. Verily,circumstances are nothing to Him. He is Kingof them all. The material is powerless to crampor to subdue. It is naught. The Spiritual con-quers every time.Many ask about her husband and children.Her husband is still what he was, and she stillhopes; her boys are with us. A little daughterhas been given to her. Lately, because of her:ourageous witness, her house roof was burneddown. She wrote on a post-card, covered withcrowded Tamil, a vivid account of the fire, endingthus : " But through bitterness comes sweetness."A.C.DOHNAVUR1930

As this book, written over thirty years ago, goesout once more it seems necessary to add to theauthor's own forewords and bring the story upto date, incorporating in this note details ofwhat she herself wrote when the sixth reprintwas made.Mimosa had the joy of seeing her husbandturn to the Lord, and later receive baptism.She continued to live in her village with him butfrequently visited us in Dohnavur. On oneoccasion she arrived just at the time whenGolden, a leprosy patient, was longing to see her.A Tamil version of Mimosa's life had been readto Golden, and she was eager to see with her owneyes the one who had held fast to her faith inChrist for over twenty years, without humanhelp. Her face shone when Mimosa was broughtto her bedside, realizing that it was God Himselfwho had made this meeting possible.The translation of the book into variouslanguages, however, though it brought blessingto many, was followed by sharp spiritual attackupon Mimosa herself, attack which lasted forover a year before she came through to peaceand victory.In 1938 she became seriously ill, and wasbrought to our Hospital, where she rested inpeace until the trumpets sounded for her andshe went in to see the King.Four of her sons are with us now, trusted andloved fellow-workers. Her daughter, who ismarried, is living elsewhere and so is heryoungest son, born after the book was written.Her husband is spending his old age here inDohnavur. The eldest of their grandchildren(Kinglet's son) has begun to take his share in thework among the boys.Star was called Home in May, 1939, only sixmonths after her sister. The story of her earlyyears has been written in the book, PloughedUnder. God called her to serve Him in Dohna-vur, chiefly among the young boys, but her lovereached out to all, so that her life is a radiantmemory to those who knew her. Thoughsheltered from the physical hardship and carethat were Mimosa's lot, Star in her warfare forsouls knew the wounds and piercing sorrowsthat such work brings.For both sisters as they entered into Life thewords of Pilgrim's Progress were true: " Youmust there receive the comfort of all your toil,and have joy for all your sorrow; you must reapwhat you have sown, even the fruit of all yourprayers and tears and sufferings for the Kingby the way."B. C. 0.DOHNAVUR, 1958.

SHE was standing out in the sunshine when Ifirst saw her, a radiant thing in a crimson andorange sari, and many bright bangles. Shelooked like a bird from the woods in her coloursand her jewels, but her eyes were large and softand gentle, more like a fawn's than a bird's.We welcomed her and her tall father, whostood beside her; but there was always an in-ward misgiving in our welcome to that father,for his little daughter, Star, was with us, andthough he had consented to her staying with us,he might at any time retrieve her.How present the past may be: it is as if hestood before me now, that upright, valiant Hindu,with his clear-cut face and piercing eyes, everyline of him expressing a fixed determination.I see the lyer (Walker of Tinnevelly) meetinghim with a friendly gesture of welcome (to shakehands would have been pollution). I see the twomen, so apart yet so alike in certain traits ofcharacter, walking through the living-room to theside room used as a study.Then after a little would come a call, and wewould go together to the other room, and withwhat eagerness search the two men's faces as weentered. And then would flame past a burninghalf-hour, and at last-time after time this hap-pened-the father would rise, and towering abovehis daughter stretch out his hand to take her,and down would fall his arm."What is it? What power is it? It is as ifa paralysis were upon me," he said once.And we told him : " The Lord God of heavenand earth has marked this child for His. It is Hiswill that she should learn of Him." And hebowed to the word and allowed her to stay a littlelonger.But nothing could prevail upon him to leavethe younger one. We were keeping caste asregarded Star, every scrupulous observance wasbeing kept; for we had not the right to allowher to break the law of her family. We wouldhave done the same for Mimosa. But no, shemight not stay.The child, who in that one afternoon hadheard what drew her very soul in passionatelonging to hear more, pleaded earnestly:" Oh, father, just for a little while that I mayunderstand a little, only a very little, and I willreturn.""Wouldst thou shame me, 0 foolish one?Is not one shame enough?"Again she pleaded, all her shyness of her sternfather and all fear of offence melted in the strongfires of desire."Oh, father, father!"But he turned on her indignant: "Look at thysister. Is not one shame enough, I say?" andhe withered her with his wrath.There was silence for a moment. ThenMimosa burst into tears.The farewells were soon said. As they weregoing away the child turned, and I saw the littlefigure in its bird-breast raiment against the darkgreen shadows of the mango-trees. Dashing thetears from her eyes, she tried to smile to us; andmy last memory of her, and it has lived all thesetwenty-two years, is of big, beautiful brown eyestrying to smile through tears.And we? We went back to the duty of theday and tried not to be downcast; but the childhad been more than usually intelligent; and shehad listened with such a sweet and charmedattention to the little we had time to tell her thatwe could all but hear the Lover of children say:"Suffer her to come unto Me." Would theysuffer her to come? If only we might havetaught her more of Him! How could she pos-sibly remember what we had told her? It wasimpossible to expect her to remember.Impossible? Is there such a word where thethings of the Lord are concerned?

This heartwarming testimony of Gods love and faithfulness, in the most unusual circumstances, is wonderfull. The simple sincere way that Amy Carmichael was able to tell the story is timeless. (Hope I spelled the name right)Greg :-)

:-)

"SOMETHING has happened to the child. Whatis the matter with her ?"The speaker, Mimosa's mother, was angry.And when that mother was angry the stickdanced." Look at her, not a vestige of the holy asheshas she smeared on her forehead.""What will the neighbours say?" It was anaunt who was speaking now."Come, thou little ingrate, come here thismoment !" The child came, but she stoodsilent.Then the mother, the aunt, the older sisters,and anyone who happened to be passing, talkedto her. They talked all at once, and they alltalked loudly. The house was full of theirclamour. They talked promiscuously to eachother and to her, and hurled proverbs like littlepellets at her head."The child is bewitched. Look at her! Shehas drunk of the magic medicine of the whitepeople."*'Yea, she is charmed. There is a charm in thewhite people's talk. Charmed? She is spoiled.' The spoiled child fears not the word,' as thesaying is. Let her taste the rod."" Like the help of the rod what help is there ?"Then all together: "Will the child that fearsnot the reproving eye fear the chastening hand ?Nevertheless feel it she must."" The twig unbent within five years, will it bebent at fifty ?""The unbeaten bull, will it be broken to itswork ?""The undisciplined and the untwirled mous-tache, will they attain prosperity ?"At last, exasperated by the child's silence, forMimosa did not know what to say, having alreadysaid all she knew, the mother carried her offand administered the correction so urgently re-quired. And the little girl cried softly to herselfand wondered at the strangeness of everything.She had tried to tell them, and they could notunderstand.What had she tried to tell them?It is difficult to say, just because there wasnot much to tell. But something had happenedon that afternoon when she heard for the firsttime about a living, loving God, whom we hadcalled Father, who had made everything in theworld, and the sun and moon and stars. She hadunderstood that He loved her. And a strangething had happened. Though there was no timeto tell her much of the Lord Jesus Christ, somesense as of seeing a Great Love, feeling it indeed,as one does feel love without being able to ex-plain it, had come upon her, so that she lovedthis loving One, knew He loved her, though ofwhat had been done to reveal that love to manshe knew just nothing; there had not been timeto tell her. Only she knew somehow that just asthe blue air was round about her that afternoon ;as she walked back with her father, so that whenshe looked up she could see blue beyond blue,so the love of this wonderful God was about herand above her, and everywhere was love. Tellit in terms of ordinary speech and you find your-self floating off into shoreless, soundless, timelessseas-what that child had seen that day was asmuch as a child could see of the Eternal Love.Charmed? Yes, they told the truth who said it.This book is the tale of a soul that was charmed.The question of rubbing Siva's ashes on herforehead, or refusing to rub them, had, of course,not been touched upon at all that afternoon. Butwhen she went home, and as usual the basketcontaining them was handed to her in the morn-ing as the family custom was, she shrank back,feeling instinctively that she could not rub thoseashes on now. They meant allegiance to Siva.Siva was not her God now. She had anotherGod, even the Loving One.It was this unaccountable refusal which hadfirst perplexed, then enraged her family. Thebasket, with the ashes which the father broughtonce a month from the temple, was hung froma beam in the living-room. Every morning thefather and his sons smeared the ashes on brow,arms, and breast. And the mother and daughterssmeared them on their foreheads. To go out ofdoors without that mark on was disgrace.The family bore it for a day or two, then, inthe more tolerant father's absence, the womendetermined to end it. Mimosa had struggledthrough a lame little explanation, but she couldnot show them what she had seen, and her falter-ing words had failed. She had stood amongthem"Dumb to their scorn, and turning on theirlaughterOnly the dominance of earnest eyes."But that dominance was too spiritual to appealjust then. The day came when it did. At thatmoment it was sheer naughtiness or bewitchment,or both mixed. Anyhow, there was only onething to do. "As the stick dances, the monkeymust dance. Let the stick dance." And itdanced.

I COULD BE CRUCIFIED ONCESo passed several uncomfortable years. Mimosaacquired a tiresome trick of shrugging hershoulders, and "answering back"; for she didnot by any means grow into a sweet little saintall at once, and the rather frequent and some-times severe chastisements left her sometimes ina very unsaintlike frame of mind. It was all sobewildering. If God, the God to whom sheclung the more fiercely for these sharp smitings,little limpet that she was, were indeed as she hadheard and believed, living and powerful andloving, why did He not keep her mother's handsoff the whisk which was her favourite instrumentof correction? It was a question that found noanswer. Was the child forgotten by the Lovethat had shone upon her?Love never forgets. Gradually through hertroubles a gentle sense of still being loved stolein upon her soul. She knew, though how shecould never have told, that the God she wouldnot forsake had not forsaken her. And all alone,without a single friend who understood, or asingle touch of human compassion, she was com-forted. And gradually she learned patience,learned to accept her discipline."Then came the time when I went intomaraivu." This was not tyranny, it was onlythe custom of the caste. The word means se-clusion, and the custom springs from fear. Forwhen the Mahommedan conquests changed theways of the old Hindus, they felt the secludedlife safer for their growing-up girls, and to thisday, just when the mind in her is all one eagerquestion, the child is shut up within narrowlimits, and there that child stays till her marriagereleases her," Didst thou ever break through and run out?""No, never; how could I? The Rule is tostay in.""But how didst thou endure it?"" There was no other way but to endure it.""Does no girl ever break the Rule?""Never, never." And Mimosa added, whattranslated into modern English would be : "It'snot done."And she was such a vivid girl. Into her at hercreation her Maker had inspired a soul thatmoveth to activity, and breathed a vital spirit.But this activity of vitality displeased her elders,who disapproved of "learned girls"; learningwas for boys. So Mimosa was cooped up in smallrooms and set to small tasks, and heard only thesmallest of small talk, and the inquiring mindcrowded with questions was treated as a freak." What is that to thee ? Art thou not a woman-child?" Thus passed the dull, drab years.She had much to endure. Sometimes it was asif the winds that blew about her had blown outthe one little candle that stood unsheltered inthe midst of them. Several times she yieldedand bowed before the idols. These were herdarkest periods; but she was not forsaken, theLove that followed found her. And then, all themore because she had weakened, the full blast oftrial fell on her again."I could be crucified once," said NeesamaSan of Japan, and he was a man at liberty,strong, and with full knowledge. "But this daily.crucifixion!" And now something hardly lesswas appointed for this Indian girl who had heardso little, and was to hear nothing for many years.Is not the courage of the love of God amazing?Could human love have asked it of a soul?Fortitude based on knowledge so slender, death-less, dauntless faith, who could have dared to askit but the Lord God Himself ? And what couldhave held her but Love Omnipotent? We haveyet to prove more bravely the forces of that love.

" NAY, to this assembly I go not."It was the father, head of the family and clan,who spoke, and he spoke with decision; butnever a thought that he was bidden to anotherassembly came to the daughters and relatives asthey donned their best and brightest attire andset forth with crowds of caste folk from theirown village and numbers of others to attend thegreat festival at the temple by the sea, one of thechief pilgrimages of the year.All his life he had thought of Siva as Lord ofthe soul, he had thought of his soul as an animalfettered in his flesh. His soul belonged to Sivaas an animal belongs to its master. But thefetter of the flesh had bound it. All he had donein the course of his religious life had, statedsimply, but one object. His business was toloosen the fetters of this bound soul that it mightbe restored to its owner.And now that which would for ever free it fromthis fetter of the flesh was upon him, and helooked death in the face.He had worshipped in scores of temples, givenalms, daily rubbed the sacred ashes, the Vibuthi,on brow, breast, arms; traced, in so far as mortalmight, the intricate labyrinth of the one thousandand eight names and attributes of his god, andworshipped Siva's wife and sons, whose imageswere everywhere to be seen in wayside shrine andSaivite temple. To make all safe, he had sacri-ficed to countless demons; there was nothing hecould think of that he had left undone, nor hadhe ever done those things which he ought not tohave done except in the matter of his daughterStar: he had yielded to her vain desire. And tosecure an education for his two sons he had letthem eat of Christian food.And now all that was left was to gather intoone last symbolic act his whole life's faith. AndMimosa, trembling, saw her mother bring the boxof sacred ashes to him. " Mark the Vibuthi"she said. With it thick and white upon him, thedread God of death would know him for Siva'sown.But he put the ashes from him. There wereno explanations. He was too ill for that. Heonly waved the box aside and, looking into theface of death, cried, " I go to the Supreme," andso passed.Then was done according to custom.The departed spirit is not regarded by theHindus as having passed beyond the reach ofour care, and so at once, especially in the caseof a parent, everything that love can suggest isdone to help it. This thought is behind all andgives a dignity to the ceremonies that followswift-footed upon death.Quickly, in a little shelter improvised in thecourtyard, Mimosa's father was laid on a mat,and shaved, and bathed with water hurriedlybrought from the nearest river, the sacred Copper-coloured river which the Greeks named long ago.A white muslin cloth was wrapped round himnow, and the consecrated ashes he had refusedwere rubbed on brow, breast, and arms. Then aball of rice was laid on his mouth, and on itfriends put silver coins. This was to help hisdisembodied spirit on the first part of itsjourney.And then the weeping, wailing women, led byMimosa's mother, walked round and round thebody, throwing their arms up, beating theirbreasts, tearing their loosened hair, which fell inblack masses about them. And they sat down onthe ground, and, rocking backwards and forwards,chanted the song that compares the dead man toall that is strong and glorious and dear. No onecan sit through such a scene unmoved. It is thestuff that grief is made of, the grief that has nohope.All this our little Mimosa heard and shared.But she was too dazed to chant, too stunned fortears. And when they carried her father forth toperform the remaining ceremonies at the crema-tion ground, while the conch shell was blown anda band of many instruments blared in deafeningchorus, she felt that the walls of her whole lifewere falling down about her.

PARPOMTHE next event of supreme importance toMimosa was her wedding.On the day when she was telling me about itwe were together in my room, along whose wallstand several bookcases."I will show the colours of my saris" saidMimosa, rising and going to one of the bookcases."I had one like this"-she pointed to Tre-velyan's Garibaldi (bright red)-"and one likethis "-Tennyson and His Friends (bright green)-" and this"-it was The China Martyrs of1900, in orange-yellow. A prolonged search frombookcase to bookcase followed, and finally dis-covered Kim (crimson) and Lord Kelvin's Life(terracotta-brown), which fairly satisfied her.And she had plenty of jewels. Her brass wasthe best of its kind. For all these necessarythings her father had left provision. The long,warm day saw her early at the well, with her darkhair parted smoothly and her pretty garments andbright jewels making her more than ever a birdof radiant plumage. And as the sun rose on heras she stood there, a seventeen-year-old bride,he must have loved to light her like a picture,with the old grey well for foreground and thewide sky for frame.But soon to the startled girl the word beganto be whispered; all was not as it appeared. Shewas poor.It was true. Her husband, advised by his elderbrother, a clever, unprincipled scoundrel, haddeceived Mimosa's mother. He was not onlylandless; he was neck-deep in debt.In Mimosa's family the custom was for thebridegroom to endow the bride with a substantialgift of land before marriage. This the bride-groom had done. It was the only land he had,but, of course, Mimosa's mother had no idea ofthis.Mimosa went to him. He worshipped theground she walked on (her own idiom; so Eastand West touch sometimes). When he was withher she could do as she would with him. Thetrouble was that he was generally with his elderbrother, who then held the reins. Mimosa, how-ever, had character and would not be silenced." I cannot sleep while we owe one farthing," shesaid.But this was absurd. Why should she not beable to sleep? What folly possessed her? Itwas altogether shocking, and he did so dislikeshocks.Now the neighbours, though they had beenquiet for a while after the wedding, had not for-gotten that Mimosa was not a worshipper of theusual gods. And they were sure mischief wouldcome of it; the marriage would be unlucky."Parpom" they had said. " We shall see." Andthey had twisted their hands, palms uppermost,in a curious way impossible to show in words,and waved them to and fro as if trying to waveoff the impending ill-luck. " Parpom; yes,Parpom."Then the helpful elder brother came to therescue. If Mimosa felt so, there was only onething to be done. Let her sell her marriage por-tion, the land now written to her name. Mimosaeagerly consented, and it was done. The brotherkindly helped in the transaction, and did not loseby it.But, landless, how were they to live?Mimosa went again to her husband, and spokewords that sounded like thunderclaps in hispained, astonished ears." Let us work," she said.And he gazed at her, half grieved and halfadmiring, for she was a very lovely vision withher vivid face and her golden jewels, and herlittle delicate hands and feet. On her arms andankles were silver bangles hung with little bellsthat tinkled when she moved. Yes, she was verydesirable, that could not be denied.But flower of delight as his bride might be, shewas most perniciously peculiar. What was to bedone ? Never in his dreamiest dreams had heconceived so strange a thing. Work ! Did shesay, "Let us work" ? But he had never worked,had never thought of working.What was debt ? Would not the sons that wereto be pay it off ? The interest -- yes, that was aworrying item, but, even so, it could accumulate.Let it be. This, up till now, had been his attitude.Now he found himself more or less unwillinglydenuded of that rather admirable glory of debt.(If you have no debt, does it not follow that noone trusts you enough to lend you anything, andfrom that is it not obvious that you are a personof small consequence ?) This new proposal stag-gered him; it would have been so much easier toslide into debt again. But he agreed. Yes, theywould work.The brother-in-law suggested merchandise.That was pleasant. You had only to sit in yourlittle shop-front, one of a dozen such in thebazaar, and wait till people came in to buy. Saltwas to be his commodity -- easy to store, easy toladle out. So he agreed.But money was needed even to start a saltbazaar, and the ever-helpful brother had abrilliant idea. There were Mimosa's dowryjewels, gathered one by one through careful yearsby her father. There was especially her greatgolden garland, the most costly of all. Sell theseand start in salt. To earn an honest livelihoodMimosa gave them all.They were all lost, every jewel of that heapwas lost. The brother had wise ways of losingsuch treasure. Mimosa could do nothing torecover them.There was hardly anything left that she couldsell. The little she could lay her hands on shegathered and gave to her mother; neither husbandnor brother-in-law could be trusted to keep it forher. And her mother promised to dole out asmall sum every month. When the time came togive it, the mother refused."Thou to give thy dowry jewels to thy hus-band ! Even the golden garland ! No worthydaughter of mine art thou. No money shalt thouhave of me. Let thy God help thee !"The village heard it and smiled. "Did wenot say, `Parpom' ?"

I AM NOT OFFENDED WITH YOUTHEN Mimosa went out into the fields. In herarms lay her first-born son, for the blow had fallenupon her in a weak hour. She had never heardof Hagar; but in her grief she walked in Hagar'ssteps. She hung her baby in a strip of cottonstuff and tied it to the branch of an acacia-tree.For a minute or two she swung the hammockgently till he slept, and then she went away aloneand sat her down over against him a good wayoff, and she cried unto the Lord.She had never learned to pray, never heardprayer except when we committed her to the loveof the Lord, before we said good-bye. In Tamilwe have four forms of the pronoun in the secondperson. There is thou, used by older to youngerand superior to inferior; there is a second singularform, a trifle more deferential. The third is usedgenerally from, say, child to father, and properlytranslated you; and there is one higher still,translated by such words as "your honour,"" your excellency." In Tamil classic poetry, witha wonderful instinct for eternal values, the lowestof all, thou, is used in addressing the Deity, whois recognized to transcend earth's poor titles ofrespect. The Christian usage is to employ theslightly higher singular form.Mimosa knew nothing of the classics, nor didshe know Christian usage, so to her the mostnatural word was that which she would haveused in speaking to her father; she said you."0 God," she said aloud, and the wordsseemed to rise through the thin blue air aboveher " 0 God, my husband has deceived me, hisbrother has deceived me, even my mother hasdeceived me, but You will not deceive me."Then she waited a little, looking up, andstretching out her arms : " Yes, they have all de-ceived me, but I am not offended with You.Whatever You do is good. What should I dowithout You? You are the Giver of health andstrength and will to work. Are not these thingsbetter than riches or people's help?" And againshe waited a while.Then, kneeling there in the open field, shedrew the loose end of her sari round, and spreadit, holding it open before the Lord. In somesuch way Ruth must have held her mantle whenBoaz poured into it six measures of barley. Tothe Eastern women it means all that ever can beexpressed of humble loving expectation: " ForHe said, ' Go not empty.'" Thus Mimosaknelt: "You will not deceive me."The sun beat down on her; the little youngcotton plants about her drooped their soft greenleaves, but she knelt on, heeding nothing, hersari still spread out before her God: "I am anemptiness for You to fill."Not one Scripture did she know, there wasnothing from the Book of books for the Spirit totake and show to her at that moment. But Hisresources are limitless, and back to her troubledmind came the memory of a wise word of herfather's: "He who planted the tree will waterit." Yes, God was her heavenly Gardener. HadHe not planted His little tree, would He notwater it? She dropped her sari and rose.Then what happened ? Was it, as in that olderstory, that God opened her eyes, and she saw awell of water and she went and drank of it?Suddenly all her weariness passed. She knewherself refreshed, invigorated. He had heard,her God had heard. She was not battling alongas best she could, lonely, desolate. She hadher God. " Oh, what should I do without You?"The words rose like a triumph song. With thelittle gesture of the folded hands which is theuniversal Indian Amen, she bowed her head, andstood a moment drinking from the waters ofcomfort. And then she went to the tree whereher baby swung in the light wind, and, takinghim from it, threw the wisp of cloth across hershoulders, and walked back to her home filledwith a peace that passed her understanding.

THE TULASI PLANTAND now a gallant purpose formed in her; to thewest of the village lay the cotton fields that hadbelonged to her family. Some still belonged toher relatives. She would work there like anycoolie woman, and earn money to keep herhusband and boy. And she did this, in sun andwind, and, what was far harder, she worked inthe stuffy little courtyards where the piles ofcotton were flung in heaps to be carded, breathingthe fluff-laden, stifling air for days on end. Tenminutes in one of those courtyards sends one outhalf choked. Mimosa spent an age of minutesthere.What inspired her, who can tell? She hadnever heard the command to owe no man any-thing. The traditions of her country lay towardsdebt, not from it. Her husband, the responsibleone, saw nothing uncomfortable in sitting downin it. Perhaps it was the delicate purity of hermind, perhaps the effect of the light from thelighted candle the winds had not blown out;whatever it was, it carried her through years ofhard living, and never once through all thoseyears did her hands drop to her sides in despair.But the years were piled with pain. Everyindignity which ingenuity could devise washeaped upon her. For India, kind land as sheis in many of her aspects, can be very cruel toone who crosses her law of caste and custom, anda worshipper of a strange God is not beloved in aconservative community.The Tulasi plant is sacred through all India.It is a small inconspicuous basil and it growswild everywhere. Some hold that it is pervadedwith the essence of Vishnu and his wife Lakshmi,and it is considered to be a deity in itself.Others say it is Sita, Rama's wife, one of thebeautiful Indian women of story. Others say itembodies all the deities in its fragile, fragrantstems and leaves and tiny, unpretentious flowersand fruit. Monier Williams believes it certainthat it is the object of more adoration than anyother plant in India, and so in all the world.And he quotes the prayer to it: "I adore thattulasi in whose roots are all the sacred places ofpilgrimage, in whose centre are all the deities,and in whose upper branches are the Vedas."Every day millions of Indian women, to whom itspecially seems to belong, walk round it, in itslittle pot set in the midst of their courtyard or inthe temple. And they offer rice and flowers toit, and the childless wife drinks a concoctionmade of its leaves chopped fine and mixed withwater, and the snake-bitten finds healing in itsjuice.In Mimosa's village it is more feared thanworshipped; for all the people there are Saivitesand, though worshippers of Siva consider itsacred, it is not to them what it is to worshippersof Vishnu, or Rama (one of Vishnu's incarna-tions), and so it comes to pass that the plant inthat part of the country is left to grow and multi-ply as it likes in the fields, no one touches it forfear of enraging the gods, and it is not enoughused in worship to put any check on its growth.Mimosa saw it growing in masses of aromaticclusters. She badly needed firewood. Its slenderstems do not suggest fuel, but dried they wouldserve her need. If the one true God had made it,her living God, was it His desire that it shouldwaste itself in the fields? But to use it forkindling? Who would dare?She dared. One day she carried home a hugearmful of it, and spread it to dry in her court-yard. The horrified women gathered round."The vengeance of the gods!"" Oh, bitterly they will avenge themselves onthee!"" Stay, stay, thou fool woman ! Touch it not.Burn the tulasi of the angry gods ! Disaster willfollow; the curse will fall!"The clamour grew about her. She stood quietin the midst: "But these gods are not as myGod. There is one great God, one only. How,then, can the lesser gods avenge themselves uponme? He whom I worship is Creator of thetulasi."It was a wonderful chance to witness to thetruth she held. But the women were furious andterrified too, not hurt in heart, else she couldnot have touched the plant. It was not affectionthat sharpened their abuse, it was fear; fear ofthe vengeance of the offended powers.Mimosa used her fuel and, to the surprise ofthe village, nothing immediately happened. Butthey still said, Parpom.And she was a derision daily.

HER second baby was such a lovely little fellowthat she called him Mayil, little peacock; for thethought of that gorgeous bird to this colour-loving people is not spoiled by foolish humantalk of pride being somewhere in the heart of it.Little peacock meant just beauty, and the joy ofit. Her golden boy, she called him, too, andthe word was hardly too adoring, for the smoothvelvet of such a baby's skin is not just brown,indeed, hardly brown at all. It is full of warmlight, like sunlight seen through water on brownstones, and the eyes with their long curled lashes,and the little red mouth, are so many severaldelights.What of the scorn of the village now? It wasnothing, just nothing. For six blessed monthsshe nursed her little treasure, taking him outwith her to the fields, hanging his hammock toa branch of a tree, going to him now and then asher work allowed; and he throve in the pure airand grew in loveliness every day.Then the rainy season came, and she couldnot take him out with her. Kinglet, her first-born, was now two and a half, and, after doingthe work of the house, she used to hang Mayil inhis hammock, tie a rope to it, set a pillow onthe floor, put a bowl of food beside it, and sayto Kinglet: " Stay, little one, and sit there, hereis rice, eat it when hunger comes to thee. If thylittle brother cries, see, here is a rope, pull hiscradle back and forth till he be quiet. Be goodtill I return."And then with a heavy heart (but what elsecould she do?) she would go out to the fields;and from nine in the morning till six in the even-ing those two babies were left alone, two and ahalf to tend six months.Wet to the skin and weary she would return atsunset and go straight to her poor baby. Butthose eight hours without food or drink left himgreatly exhausted, and her tears would fall onhis face as she nestled him in her arms and triedto make up to him for all he had been missing.Till the wet season was over, this was the dailyroutine. Not a neighbour, not a relative, offeredto see to her poor little boys while she was out.But this did not seem strange to her. " Whatwould you ? I was not a woman of the Way, norwas I a Hindu woman." And that seemed reasonenough to give. Why should anyone have helpedher? She was not as they. And the patiencein her face was like the look one sees on themountains, when the clouds that hang about themin the evening deepen the quiet beauty of valleyand ravine.But her poor little Mayil never quite recoveredfrom his unmothered days. He was as frail asa flower of the heat, that grows up somehowthrough the red clod, but is never like the sturdyflower of the rain. He was tall and slim, and hisbeautiful eyes were like stars. He would neverleave his mother, once he had her, without bittercrying and clinging, and she dreaded having topart with him for an hour. When he was older,and could sit by her while she did her cooking,he would play contentedly, if only he might havethe end of her sari in his hand.But he was as happy as a bird, and like a birdhe sang his own little songs that he made forhimself."What rice to-day, mother?" he would ask.And she would tell him. And then he wouldbegin to croon a line or two, to a tune of his own."What singest thou, little peacock?" shewould ask him." I sing a song of the rice," he would answer.And then he would take three pebbles like herthree cooking stones and lay a shard of potteryupon them. " See, I, too, am cooking rice, I blowthe fire, I fill the pot, I cook the rice : see, I cookit, and I sing to it!" and he would play andsing, happy to be near her. " Without me," saidhis mother, "he could not bear to be."He did not learn to walk soon. Someonesuggested planting his little feet in the earth,like two little trees. " Plant them deep. Makethe holes deep, up to his knees, and press theearth down. Then will he be compelled to stand,and finally will walk."But Mimosa thought it a cruel way, and in-stead contrived a small push-cart out of some oddpieces of wood, and he learned to walk at last.

BUT before he could walk, another little onecame who was to grow up to be very heart's joy.Music, as we see him now, is a child so sensitive,so pure of spirit, that the verse about the child-ren's angels comes constantly to mind. But hislife, like his little brother's, had its early troubles.His mother was very ill, and lay in weakness andin loneliness so profound that Kinglet, thenbarely five years old, and her husband, who,though so futile, was not an unkind man, andwho just then was at home with her, were her onlynurses, her only help.When her baby was ten days old she called herhusband. He had not noticed how day by daythe little store of grain grew less. He walked ina sleepy dream. But for Mimosa no such dreamsmight be, she knew to an ounce how much ricethere was. She had counted on being able towork by now. But the will that had carried herthrough so much was helpless before this on-slaught of great weakness." I cannot go to the fields," she said, " but willyou not go to the town by the sea"-and shenamed it-"and tell my youngest brother howthings are? Tell him I am weak, but will returnanything he may send. Ask him for the loan oftwo rupees; two only will suffice." And she senthim off.This younger brother had been well educated,as the elder brother, of whom we shall hear later,had been. And once, during the long holidayswhen he was ill here, we had nursed him day andnight. He, like his elder brother, had been bap-tized ; but, like him, though continuing a Christianin name, he had long ago turned back to thehusks.Mimosa knew this. "He has never spoken tome of that which he once believed, but surely hecannot have forgotten all? Surely he will bekind ?" she thought. He had got well-paid workas a result of the education given by Christians'money. Would he grudge two rupees of it tohelp her? She would return it; he knew shewould return it.But after her husband had gone she lay andthought of it. She had never before asked any-one for anything. She felt doubtful. Had shemade a mistake?There was a side room at one end of the house.It had no windows, only a door opening off theinner verandah. She kept her stores of grainthere, when there were stores to keep. She usedthe room for prayer, for it was quiet, remote fromthe noise of the streetWhen I heard this story, the passing of theyears had softened its outlines; but when I askedMimosa what else was in the room, her eyes filledwith the sweetest smile."Why, nothing," she said, "nothing but quiteempty earthen vessels. Nothing else at all wasin that room that day."She rose slowly from her mat and, leaning onthe wall for support, went to the room, taking herbaby with her and calling to the other two littleboys to come. They left their play and followedher in. Then she partly shut the door-not quite,lest the darkness should trouble the children-and with her arms round them she told her Fatherjust what she had done, how she had never doneso before, how she would understand if it couldnot be as she had asked, how she would knowthen that He had some other way to come to herrelief. "And it will be well, Father; howeverYou do, it will be well."Her husband returned. A walk to and fro ofthirty miles had been for nothing, for he had notbrought back any money. " No," the youngerbrother had said, forgetting the kind ways of hisland, " she is weak. How can I know she willever be strong enough to work and return it?"Then Mimosa took her little three into thatdim room again. The larger empty pots stoodon the floor, the smaller ones were heaped in acorner. " Father, it is well," she said. " All thatYou do is well."But the children's food? She paused for aminute, then in their hearing said : " O Father,it cannot be that Your little ones are to be hungry,and yet it appears to be so. I do not understandit, but it is well." And she led them out of theempty room and shut the door.Now, among her relatives was one, only a dis-tant relative, but so connected that for her to workin his fields was as if Ruth worked in the corn-fields of Boaz; and he was a kind and a just man.He had observed Mimosa; he knew that, wherevershe was, the work was done faithfully, and therewas no need to overlook it. He came now toinquire when he might hope to have her backagain.She told him that she could not say when shecould return, for she could not regain herstrength."Then send thy husband," was his not un-natural rejoinder; and he would have gone, but,noticing her thin, tired face, he drew the truthfrom her."This cannot be! I will not let it be!" heexclaimed. And he sent at once a supply for sixdays, enough to stir up the poor, slack husbandto turn his hand to some honest work, so that theloan was soon returned, enough to cheer the soulof the wife, who saw in it the loving hand of herGod. Once more she and her children went intothe dark little room, now furnished with grain,and to her grateful faith it was an illuminatedplace.

DID SHE NOT BURN THE TULASI ?

LITTLE MAYIL was three, and his small brother,
a chubby, glowing baby, had just begun to find
his way all over the house on eager, uncertain
little feet when one evening at dusk, while she
prepared the evening meal, Mimosa was startled
by a cry from her husband and ran to him on the
outer verandah. “See, see! A thorn has run
into my right foot’s ankle!”

But there was no thorn; it must have been a
snake. No snake could be found. It had stung
the foot and then glided off into the twilight.

“A snake! A snake!” No call in all India
can more quickly gather a crowd. In the twink-
ling of an eye, as it seemed, the house was full of
people, commiserating, inquiring, advising, de-
claiming, prophesying death and destruction. It
was only the usual crowd that attends upon all
excitements and completes all confusions; but in
and out of it and through it ran real emotion,
real distress. Relatives wailed aloud, women tore
their hair, and beat themselves, and violently
knocked their heads against whatever hard thing
lay near. To everyone poor Mimosa’s husband
was as good as dead.

Meanwhile, thus encouraged, the poison “as-
cended to the skull” until the bitten man was in
desperate pain, “as if the bones were being cleft
in two,” and the sympathetic clamour waxed
louder and more excited, and the street filled as
half the village turned out to mourn and lament
his rapidly approaching death.

And in the midst was Mimosa, doing what she
could to relieve him, paying no heed to the sibi-
lant whisper that presently began to fill the room
like the hissing of a snake. ” It is she! It is
she! It is she that has swallowed her husband’s
life. It is she! It is she! Did she not burn
the tulasi ?”

The excitement subsided, for her husband did
not die, but lay very ill and tormented with pain,
and she knelt by the stricken man, and she
prayed, crying upon her God, the God of gods,
and she went into the little dark room and held
out her sari in supplication to Him. And she
nursed him with all the skill she knew, putting
on poultices of fine-chopped rice straw, and feed-
ing him with tempting food. And her faithful,
tender heart rejoiced exceedingly when at last he
was out of danger of death; but he was blind and
he was mad. Blind and mad on her brave hands !

Brother, it has been a long time. Hope it is well with you.

Hello Mike,

boy howdy, time flies when the Lord is turning your world upside down :)

I am doing well..thanks

Karsten

[b]Seed Corn[/b]

IT was just then, then in her desperate hour, that
succour came.

There were a few Christian families in the
village, but none of them took any notice of
Mimosa; for, with the exception of one family,
they were of another caste, and they were all of
the kind known as Name-Christians. It is easy
to blame them and wonder at their lovelessness
but if they had interfered in her affairs it is not
likely they could have continued to live peace-
fully in the village. Her caste would have made
life most unpleasant for them. Only a very
ardent love will face things being made uncom-
fortable, and is ardent love found everywhere?
The one Christian family belonging to Mimosa’s
caste was confessedly nominal-Christian only
because the grandfather and grandmother had
joined the Way years ago, and, being conserva-
tive in feeling, the family stayed on in the re-
ligion. But between its kind of Christianity and
Hinduism pure and simple there had never been
much of a hedge, and the hedge, such as it was,
had many gaps now, through which one might
comfortably creep. To such, a converted, en-
lightened Mimosa would have been very un-
welcome.

But the old grannie who was not ” nominal”
still lived. Her picture, drawn once for all will
be found in Faber’s “Old Labourer.”

” What doth God get from him ?
His very mind is dim,
Too weak to love, and too obtuse to fear.
Is there glory in his strife?
Is there meaning in his life?
Can God hold such a thing-like person
dear?”

Thing-like person ? So she may have seemed;
but she was a King’s messenger. She had been
away from her village for some time, and now
returned, very old, very stupid, very ignorant.
She had never learned to read, and she had long
ago forgotten or ceased to be able to tell any
Bible story she had ever known. The very name
of Jesus our Lord seems to have slipped from
her; she only spoke of God, using a word she
might have used if she had been a Hindu; but
she remembered it meant Father, and this was
the word she gave Mimosa, to whom every
lightest syllable was a crumb from the loaf of
life.

“He will never forsake you; He has never
forsaken me. Meditate on Him and He will not
forsake you. In Heaven (she used the word that
means Release) there is no pain. To that good
place He will take you. He will wonderfully
lead you. In every least thing He will wonder-
fully lead you.”

And she repeated this over, as the aged will,
and said: ” He who is God is your Father. He
will wonderfully lead you, in every least thing
He will wonderfully lead you.”

Soon afterwards she lost the little memory she
had, and no one knew what her thoughts were.
But “she heard the angels sing when she was
dying.”

One other help was given.

In Mimosa’s village there was a room where
the Christians worshipped, and in the same room
the children of their families were taught by a
loud-voiced teacher, who chanted his lessons in
a sing-song tone, caught up and echoed down the
street by the children.

One day when Mimosa was passing she heard
the verse being chanted.

“Do not rub on ashes,
Do not offer matted hair to idols.
The boast of the boaster is like the bite of the
snake;
When the Coming King arrives to judge,
excuses will not pass with Him.”

It was rather a medley of words, tossed together
more because of their Tamil sound than for
mental affinity. The gist of it, however, caught
her fancy, so the jostle of ideas did not matter.
Siva’s ashes, the matted, undressed hair of the
devotee offered to the gods, the prideful boast
that falls before the Coming King-a new name
this-led straight to a new idea. Her Lord must
be coming back to the world. That was the one
arresting thought.

We can gather up the less than an infant’s
fistful of seed corn given to Mimosa. We can
count the seeds, they were so few: there were
nine. That God is, that He loves, guides, and,
being the God of gods, is all-powerful, that He
listens when we pray, that as a Father we may
think of Him and that ” He who plants the tree
will water it.” That the Place of Release is much
better than this world, for there is no pain there,
and that the Lord who lived here before will come
back. She had also heard that “some time, at
the last,” there would be a judgment and excuses
would not stand. But this event felt too remote
to find much place in her theology.

Of her Saviour as Christ crucified she knew
nothing yet. In the few minutes she was with us
we could only begin to tell His story, and chiefly
we spoke of Him as the Lord who loved her. But
she had seen Him without knowing Him. ” Who
is the Lord, that I might believe on Him ?” And
before the Saviour of the world had time to
answer, “It is He that talketh with thee,” she
was caught away. But what can hinder the
following power of the love of Christ? And who
can measure the force of the life of a seed?
Open one of earth’s little seeds and find the
plant that is to be, carved in polished ivory. See
the packing of the nourishment required. See,
and worship and adore.

Of all the stories we have touched since we
came to India, hardly one has humbled us so
much, as we thought of our faithless fears for the
little Mimosa. But hardly one has lifted us so
high in adoration, and in wonder, and in awe.

[b]Backgrounds[/b]

ONE evening, while these things were happening
to Mimosa, we at Dohnavur spent an hour with
the polariscope just acquired for our microscope.
Joyfully we tried the different combinations
offered by polarizer, selenite, and mirror.
Feathery crystal of barium platino-cyanide, like
sprays of peacocks’ feathers, fairy cornucopia
from a fern, the little thorny marvel of a sole’s
scale-these and a score of others held us en-
chanted. Then as the blues and lilacs and violets
and purples paled into something like the steel-
blue of sheet lightning, we wanted the indigo of
the thunder-cloud for background, and for those
opalescent seashell colours, that are like nothing
earthly, but must be sought for in air and water,
we wanted the beryl of the sea; and so it went
on till we knew the perfect background for each
delight; the difficulty was to get it.

We had just touched perfection with an ex-
quisite blue against brown like the bark of a tree
-only that polariscope colours are never flat but
always, as it were, an atmosphere-the little
spikes on the sole’s scale were gleaming poniards,
and iridescent lights played on the plated armour;
not a pearly tint was lost, when one of the
children, eagerly sharing this pleasure with us,
moved the adjustments and lost the perfect foil.

We tried to recover it, but in vain. We did
not know the laws of light well enough to find it.
Or it may have been that the setting sun had
dropped his cooler tones and was only all red
flame. Whatever the cause, till days afterwards,
when we found it again, we thought of it as a kind
of little, visible, lost chord, beautiful, elusive,
within the fraction of a turn of a wheel, but out
of reach of our commanding. If only we had
better known the laws of light, if only we could
have stayed the going down of the sun, should
we not have found it with a touch ?

We all have our small and private windows
which look out upon great matters. This little
clear window did for us that day look out upon
far fields. What if we could look through some
heavenly polariscope and read, as, perhaps, the
angels read, the meaning of the background for
the colours of our lives? But then we should
miss the blessing of those who do not see and
yet believe.

It is difficult to imagine oneself stripped of all
helps to faith, whether from the text of the Book
itself or these its illuminated illustrations; but if
this story is to be understood, and not merely
taken at a run and forgotten, there must be some
mental effort here. Mimosa stood alone among
her people, a woman charmed by a beauty she
could not show to them. Round her were the
blazing streets, the little, hot houses, the curious,
unsympathetic faces, the crowding work of life.
But always it was as if One only just out of sight
were moving through those streets with her.
What He did with her was good. Was He not
all-powerful, so that He could direct everything?
Had He not shown her by a thousand secret signs
that she was loved ? Would she, who was only a
human mother, deny one good thing to her little
son if she had the power to grant it? No more
would He.

In this way, by the low-set stepping-stones
that lead across the stream that divides the
material from the spiritual, she found herself in
a place where nothing could shake her. The
strange colours of her background could not
perplex her. And this was what she really meant
when she said, not asking for blue days, but
looking up steadfastly into grey skies, beaten by
rain and wind, ” I am not offended with You,”
no, not even while her poor husband lay mad
and blind, and the people pointed at her and
said : ” Did we not say Parpom ?”

I have long loved the story of Mimosa. It is beautifully told as you say and is, to me, a thrilling testimony to the fact that God does not leave himself without a witness. Mimosa pursued those tiny sparkles of insight that God gave her through a pagan darkness as thick as Egypts, but pursue she did, and having diligently sought, she found.

She reminds me of Rahab who, while the 2 spies returned to the comfort and fellowship of the camp, maintained her lonely vigil of faith in Jericho. Little wonder that James puts her alongside Abraham as a supreme example of faith. When 'the roll is called up yonder' I think we shall find many Mimosas and the Mimosas may wear heavier crowns than many a preacher.

[b]The Golden Pot That Had Manna[/b]

THE nearest asylum was five hundred miles away.
It might as well have been five thousand. Before
a patient can be admitted there, various pre-
liminaries naturally are required. Of these
Mimosa knew nothing, nor did she probably
know there was such a place as an asylum in the
world. She lived through those months with her
sari in her hand, to use her own idiom, which
was her simple way of telling of prayer without
ceasing in mute appeal and faith that help was
on its way; not trying to pierce the thick mystery
that has baffled mankind since the beginning,
but accepting it, unintelligible as it was, as
“well.” Only she did most earnestly beseech
that her husband’s reason might return; for with-
out the control of reason a blind man can be
very terrible.

And gradually it returned, and his eyes became
less darkened. “We had no help, no medicine
did I know of, nor had I money to buy it. It was
only our God’s healing.” And she sent a thank-
offering to the Christian church which knew
nothing of her.

Nor did we in Dohnavur know anything of her.
Through all these years Star and Mimosa had
been kept apart. Never once had Mimosa been
allowed to accompany the other sisters who some-
times came to see us; nor had Star been allowed
to hear anything of her. Now, at last, she heard
of her distress, and longed to get in touch with
her. But how ? Mimosa could not read. It was
not likely that verbal messages would be given.
After some pondering. Star decided to write.
” O my living Lord, incline the heart of someone
to read it to her,” she prayed as she wrote, and
believed it would be so.

And so it was. The letter safely reached
Mimosa’s house, and a kindly cousin read it to
her.

Trembling with joy, she listened. For Star
had been constrained to write to her as to a fellow-
believer, fellow-lover. Almost wondering at her-
self, for she could not understand why she was
so directed. Star had opened the twenty-seventh
psalm to this, as she thought, Hindu sister, copy-
ing in full the verse which in Tamil reads:

” Though my father and my mother may forsake
me, the Lord will draw me close to Himself.”

Strange that what is life of life to one is mere
dust of words to another. The cousin read in-
differently in the sing-song drone of India; as
coined gold Mimosa received the words, loving
them, desiring to linger over them. But coined
gold is a poor simile, and, though little enough
of it had come her way, Mimosa would have
heaped it in handfuls on the floor for just those
words that she heard now.

Then, the reading over, she took this, her very
first letter, in her hands, and, touching her eyes
with it in the pretty, reverent way of the East,
she carefully folded it and put it in the box where
she kept her one possession of value, the title-
deeds of her little house. If she had heard of
the golden pot that had manna, that was kept in
the ark of the Covenant overlaid with gold, she
would have thought thus of her precious letter.
And thereafter when overwhelmed by troubles
and sorely in need of sustenance, she would go
to that box and take out her letter, and, smooth-
ing its pages with tender fingers, try to recall the
words written upon them. Or if the friendly
cousin could be found, she would get him to read
it to her again, till, fed by that hidden manna, she
was strong to continue. But it never occurred to
the cousin to write and tell us about her, nor did
it enter her mind that such a thing could be done.
So we went on knowing nothing.

[b]The Stab Of A Knife[/b]

SLOWLY, very slowly, the months crawled past.
Mimosa had to go to work, or the food would
have failed. So she combed her hair with her
fingers (for after the birth of one’s first child it is
not allowed to dress one’s hair before going out,
or to wear the dear little frivolous bell bangles on
arms and ankles), and she went to the fields and
worked. Her husband lay like a log on his mat,
and was one more to feed. Kinglet could be
trusted to attend to his needs, and when she
could not take them with her he would watch over
Mayil and Music.

One day her brothers came to see their elder
sister, a widow who lived near, and they took
little Mayil to spend the day with them.

In the evening when Mimosa returned from the
fields, and was going as usual to prepare the
evening meal, deep in her heart, “just here”-
and she showed where the words cut-” pricking,
pricking like the prick of the point of a knife,”
was this : ” Go first and see to Mayil! Go first
and see to Mayil!” And she obeyed. Flying
across to the other house and breaking in upon
the company gathered there, she found them play-
ing cards. In a flash, as she shows it, one sees
the very gesture of the card-players, the half-
closed eyes, the swaying forms, hears the peculiar
little sounds of the game, as she saw and as she
heard them in that one unforgettable moment.

” Oh, you to play while my little peacock lies
dying!” She flung her indignation at them and
fled with her child stiff in convulsions in her arms.

What had happened she never heard. If it
was known, no one told. For a fortnight Mayil
lay at death’s door, then slowly turned and came
back to her.

But he lay in mortal weakness, and the neigh-
bours, moved by sight of her anxiety, urged her
to offer a chicken and a few cocoanuts. ” So little,
does she grudge so little ?” They told her what
would happen if she did not do it. Her child
would die. They watched her then, as she knelt
before her God, the God invisible, who was, she
said, the only true God. But it must have been
that He did not hear, or, hearing, did not care,
for He did not come to her relief. He abode
still in the same place where He was, that far,
far place to which, as all who came assured her,
prayers, without gifts to further them, could never
find the way.

There was no doctor, of course; there is no
mission hospital in this whole reach of country,
no place of any kind where a little child would
be sure of skilled care, no way of help that was
not far beyond her means to secure. So the little
Mayil lay with his two fingers tucked into his
mouth in his old baby way, thinking to comfort
himself so; and his mother, with her very heart
breaking for love of him, saw him slowly growing
worse.

It was very hard for Mimosa to be without
going to work. Several times during this illness
she had had to leave him to get money to buy
food. He had fretted sorely. If only he might
quickly recover she would be able to take him
with her. It was too dreadful to leave him and
know he would pine for her all day.

And now comes what to some of us seems the
most poignant page of this story. Mayil was re-
covering when a wise woman told his mother
that, if only she gave him two duck’s eggs
chopped fine in water, he would immediately be
well.

So, impressed by the wise woman’s confident
assurance, she bought two duck’s eggs, boiled
them hard, chopped them fine, mixed them with
water, and fed Mayil, almost expecting to see the
little thin limbs fatten visibly, so sure was the
wise woman.

But at once he became very ill. Dysentery
set in. Daily, hourly he grew worse.

Just then, while her husband still lay prostrate
and her precious little son was so ill, the rain
came on; the roof, unrepaired, leaked; and the
mud walls fell in on the floor, all but on top of
them.

How her husband was got out Mimosa does
not remember. In the pouring rain she searched
for shelter and found an empty house, but the
rent asked was too high. Near by was her
widowed sister. That sister did not love her, her
ways were not hers. But, fearing the talk of the
neighbours who would feel it too barbarous to
refuse shelter under such circumstances, she
opened her house to the family; and to her other
labours Mimosa added the gradual repair of her
home. Somehow she got a few palm leaves for
the roof, bit by bit she gathered up the fallen
mud, built it into place; but, before she had
finished it, the shock of the disturbance and the
chill had so acted on her little Mayil that even
her eyes, that refused to see, saw at last that he
must go.

She took him in her arms. We who know her
can see her as she did it. Never were tenderer
mother-eyes, gentler, braver hands.

“My little one,” she said, “listen. I have
taught you to pray. Shall I pray now that you
may be taken out of this pain? Let us pray to
the Lord “-and she used the word her father
had used in his dying hour, the Lord the
Supreme. Then she prayed, and she said : ” It
is well, O Lord, whatever You do. It is well.”

And Mayil said nothing, but lay with his two
little fingers in his mouth. ” These “-and she
held up and touched her own as if they had been
Mayil’s-”it was the way he lay when he was a
baby wanting me. And while he was sucking
his fingers for comfort, the Lord took him.”

[b]Take care of my bird[/b]

CROWDS came, according to custom; few sym-
pathized. Who could justly sympathize with a
mother who had refused to save her child? The
kindly women would abstain from reproach; but
all were not kind, and the feeling of the place
was against her. Had she not burned the tulasi ?
Had she not refused, even to bring sure health
to the child, all magic, even the mildest, all efforts
to appease the angry gods ? She would not break
a mere halfpenny cocoanut in the devil’s honour.
What wonder gods and demons were ranged
against her now?

It is hard enough to bear grief when tenderness
is all about one. What must it be to bear it when
these pricking briars abound?

On the day he died the women, emboldened by
the silence of her grief, said cruelly and openly
to her that she, and she alone, was responsible;
and they laughed at her vain prayers. ” Was it
that your God did not hear you? Or is it that
you do not know how to pray?” And they
pointed to the little dead child. ” There lies your
God’s reply to you.”

Then Mimosa broke her silence. ” My child
God gave : my child God has taken. It is well.”

But she was weak and weary after the vain
nursing, and she was ill with grieving; and when
she was alone, and had not her God’s good name
to defend, the question would return, Why was
not her little peacock left to her ? Till at last it
came to her that perhaps He knew she, his poor
mother, could not have taken proper care of so
beautiful a child, ” and so He took him to Him-
self that He might take better care of him.” And
she looked up with the old word: ” I am not
offended with You.”

But before this last comfort came, with the
terrible hurry of the tropics, he had been snatched
away from her. Sometimes-in cholera times, for
example, when panic forbids the usual ceremonies
-a man will pass from vigorous health through
seizure, illness, death, and burial, or cremation,
within four hours. A child, with hardly a
minute’s pause for farewell, is wrapped in a little
old cloth and carried out and burned.

” But my little one shall not be burned as a
Hindu, as a child of the living God shall he be
buried,” had been her decision, and nothing
would move her from it. She had no perfect
sureness about him, for she did not feel that she
could claim room for him in the Place of Release,
the Christian’s Heaven, because he was not a
Christian child, and yet she could not bear to
seem to consign him to the uncertainty of his
father’s creed. “For myself I did not go to the
church, so I was nothing, and had no right to
ask for anything for him, and yet my heart in-
sisted: ‘He shall have Christian burial.’” So
not a conch shell was blown for him, there was
no wailing; and the little body was sown as a seed
on the open plain, to wait the Resurrection of
which his mother then knew nothing. And the
people said: ” She is mad. Who heeds what a
mad woman does?” But Mimosa said: “My
bird has flown.” And she held up her hands
with a gesture of committal. ” Take care of my
bird.”

[b]Hair Cutting[/b]

BACK to her now recovering husband went
Mimosa and continued her faithful nursing. His
hair had not been cut for a year, or dressed in
any way, or once combed; for he would have felt
a drop of oil or the touch of a comb as dangerous
as water, which, as all know, is deadly in any
kind of illness. Mats of it lay about him in
tangled heaps. But at last he was willing to have
it cut.

But who would cut it? The barber was called
and was afraid. It is unlucky to cut such hair.
Mimosa took the scissors. “I will cut it. Let
the ill-luck be on me!” Her fingers were
blistered before she had finished, but at last all
was cut and carefully deposited on the dust-heap.
To burn it would have been too dangerous; the
neighbours would have interfered. As it was,
they were shocked. “What a wife!” they said,
and turned up the palms of their hands at her.

But the barber did not mind, for he did not
lose his fee; Mimosa gave it to him just as if he
had done his work, a whole precious rupee. Are
there any givers so generous as the very poor ?

[b]The Magic Medicine[/b]

FOR they were very poor now, and when the
husband had recovered sufficiently to be able to
do light work, Mimosa, who was by this time
quite worn out and unable for the fields, urged
him to accept it. He could see a little, and the
work did not ask much of him; it was only to be
travelling-companion to a relative who was going
to one of the holy places of the South.

It was beautiful there. The fresh wind blew
through a gap in the hills; many pilgrims daily
bathed under a great waterfall, believing that so
they washed away their sins. Day by day heart-
moving little scenes were staged under overhang-
ing rocks and deep in the woods, by the waters’
edge, and sometimes under the spray of the falls.
Perhaps there is nothing in all the world of wor-
ship more heart-moving in its pathos than just
this bathing of the body for the expiation of the
sins of the soul.

Mimosa’s husband bathed with the others; but
he never thought of his real sins; they did not
come within farthest reach of his consciousness.
To him, as to all these bathers, sin was a word
denoting ceremonial defilement, the touching of
an outcast even in compassion and mercy, the
involuntary contaminations of outward life-
these, not what we mean by sin, still less his slack-
ness and general selfish laziness, were what chiefly
concerned him. Here and there may have been
one with a more enlightened sense, “one in a
thousand, perhaps,” said a pilgrim who sought
far and at last found forgiveness and cleansing
and peace.

There was a wizard worshipping at the water-
fall that year, and he gave Mimosa’s husband a
magic medicine. It was a black, inky, sticky
substance wrapped in a leaf. Said the wizard :
“Take a third portion of this medicine once a
day for three successive days with a small part
of the leaf. For forty days thereafter take only
food cooked in a new earthen vessel and served
from the pot with a newly made wooden ladle.
On the fortieth day thy sight will be restored.”
And it was so. Mimosa’s husband returned quite
well. India is the home of suggestion and of
auto-suggestion.

[b]The Talisman[/b]

AND when he returned he had much to say of
the magical properties of that medicine. And
Mimosa’s neighbours had much to say to her.

“Poor foolish woman, have we not told thee
that all thy troubles would pass if only thou wert
wise as thy husband? Look at him restored to
health. And by whom? And by what? And
thy little peacock, where is he ? If only thou wert
more wise, and hadst used good sense and fol-
lowed our counsel, would he not be in thine.
arms now ? 0 empty arms! 0 most foolish
mother!

” Who but a hard-hearted woman would refuse
a charm to save her dying child? Did we not
tell her, did we not say again and again : `Follow
the customs of thy country?’ ” And so it went
on till Mimosa was weary of it.

For, far wiser than she, men wiser than her
husband, even wonderful, learned men who wrote
many English letters after their names, believed
in charms and amulets and all such occult ways
of securing good fortune.

It was true, and it is true. As this tale goes to
press there has come by post a witness thereto in
the shape of a green-covered ten-page magazine.
It is called The World-renowned Talisman.
There is a picture of the inventor and proprietor’s
imposing residence with a temple alongside, as if
in attendance on the house; and then comes a
picture of believers coming for the talisman, and
the pages are crammed with letters, not anony-
mous testimonials in the shamefaced manner of
the West, but outspoken, explicit, and very inter-
esting letters, signed, and with the writers’
addresses in full.

Here you see B.A.s, judges and magistrates,
lawyers and station-masters, Government officials
and doctors, and clergymen, and all manner of
private people, anxious students, or chiefly
students relieved, for with the charm the stiffest
examination becomes easy. All stand forward
and with frank voices tell their happy stories. A
surgeon “cannot find words imaginable to extol
the inevitable effects of the charm. It is sooth-
ing balm to the afflicted minds of mankind who
uses it.” ” My long-cherished desire of serving
the Hon’ble the Maharajah Bahadur has been
fulfilled. I am happy under His Highness’ good
esteem.” This is from a High Court barrister-
at-law with a tail ten letters long after his name.
The charm did it. A police officer receives
honours from Government, a student passes
” under great difficulties” his law examinations,
so does another his Cambridge Local-he stands
first in his province-and an exultant B.A. writes
of his thankfulness. But scores more attest its
virtues in much the same language. ” I proclaim
[them] by beat of the drum,” remarks one, for
all are grateful, and have no false shame what-
ever. After all, why should they have any?
What are examinations but trap-doors through
which you crawl if you have luck, and in which
you stick if you have not?

“I bought it for the purpose of passing the
Matriculation examination. No doubt through
the wonderful efficacy I have gained a very
brilliant result in it.” “I passed my Inter-
mediate, which was hopeless to get through. I
find no words to express the efficacy of your re-
nowned charm.”

Business men rise rapidly and get large in-
crease of pay. Unfortunates involved in litigation
win their cases. (What if both sides wore it?)
The charm wins in a huge lottery; twenty
thousand rupees fall into the lap of its wearer,
whose life it also “saves from drowning by its
divine power. Even my friend who gave me the
talisman passed the Cambridge Senior Local with
four distinctions and first-class honours.” As for
the mysterious influences of the stars, they slink
away before it. ” I suffered on account of bad
effect of my stars, I have been subjected to the
evil effects of planets,” but the charm has ended
that. It has been ” working like galvanic battery.
Its effect in guarding the evil influence of planets
is really wonderful. It bestowed on me good
health and happiness. It has increased the
beauty and charmingness of my body.” And the
physician of two well-known maharajahs (great
kings) tells how the charm acts like a spell. A
tiny child just the age of Mimosa’s little peacock
was saved from death through its means. And
another says simply: ” I was unwell, and it did
cure me. I do believe there is something in it
which prevents evil from doing mischief.” And
so it goes on.

With this all round her, and nothing whatever
that did not breathe the same spirit, Mimosa
pondered long. How piercing a thorn in the
heart ” if only ” may be ! If only I had done this
or that. Who does not know the pricking of that
thorn? Could it be that she was wrong? Had
she indeed slain, by her refusal to look this way
at all, her precious little peacock? But she
turned from the perplexity; there were many
things that she could not understand. But one
thing she knew: If her God were the true God,
then He was over all. God was the true God,
therefore He was over all. Therefore charms
were under Him. And what need to go to the
thing that is undermost, when you may go direct
to Him that is higher than all?

” Nay, shall I be as one who goes to the servant
when he might go to the Master of the house-
hold?” Thus did she answer herself. “And
about these matters, my Father, I do not know
anything. But I think it must be enough to leave
them with You, my Father.” And she went on
in peace.

[b]In The House Of Her Friends[/b]

AND at last with fresh courage Mimosa gained
strength and set to work to retrieve her poor little
fortune. In India, when one is sick, one’s rela-
tives come in clusters, stay a day or two, and
depart, to return perhaps again if the sickness be
prolonged. They come to inquire, as the saying
is, to lament, and to advise. Not to do so would
show lack of family affection and all proper
feeling.

A death draws even larger clusters, the most
distant relatives flock around then. And, as
children always come with their parents and all
must be fed, it may be imagined that illness and
death are expensive luxuries and empty the family
purse, unless it be a very full one, nearly as
thoroughly as a wedding does. But no Indian
householder would dream of omitting to provide
food for all who come. At any cost it must be
done.

The cost to Mimosa had been the sale of every-
thing that could be sold, all went to feed her
guests. She often went hungry herself. It was
a lean time.

As soon as possible she got to work in the
fields of the kind Boaz, but she looked, as she
was, poor. No gold ornaments were in her ears,
no necklet round her neck. The poorest in India,
if of any respectable family, clings to this visible
bank-deposit. To be in debt is nothing, you
may be richly jewelled and yet be in debt. No
one thinks anything of that, not even the creditor.
You may even beg with jewels in your ears.
The stoniest heart would not blame you or refuse
you alms for any such trifling cause. But to be
unjewelled is disgrace, humiliation, intolerable.

But Mimosa, as we know, had the most curious
thoughts about such things, no one understood
her. She was a law to herself. So she sold her
few jewels kept back from the sale of her dowry,
and fed the flocks of kind inquirers, and did not
go into debt. It was when she had none to wear
that her brother’s child died.

” Do not go to inquire,” said her husband, for
neither that brother nor his wife had come to in-
quire when her little peacock flew away, and for
the moment she was sorely tempted to retaliate as
her husband urged. But she put the thought
aside as unkind, and she and her little sons went.

The feast was spread; to each guest a large
fresh leaf was given of young green plantain,
like fine satin in texture, most beautiful of plates.
On it was heaped rice with the various curries.
The leaf once used is thrown on the ash heap,
never used again.

When the one who was serving came to the
unjewelled Mimosa and her two little sons, she
laid before her an old leaf used by another guest,
and on it was the rice and curry left over from
that other meal.

Mimosa could hardly believe she saw rightly.
No such indignity had she ever before seen, heard
of, or imagined. To touch the leaf of another
is to become ceremonially unclean, to touch the
food left over an unthinkable defilement. No
child would offer such an insult to its fellow. To
offer it to a guest-Mimosa was stunned, and sat
silent. Similar leaves were put before her little
boys. They understood the offence and burst
into angry tears.

Then their mother knew what she must do.
“Do not cry, my little ones,” she whispered, and
gently touched the indignant children, who would
have risen and left the house. ” See, we must be
patient, we must be quiet. Say nothing to dis-
turb the feast but take the food.” And in a lower
whisper she added: “Let us accept even this.
Without the allowing of our God it could not
have been done.”

But it cut deep. As soon as possible without
causing scandal she left the house; and, not trust-
ing herself to accept food from friends on the
way lest her still hot wrath should boil over and
she should say words better left unspoken, she
and her boys walked the fifteen miles home; and,
after bathing comprehensively as if to wash off
the very remembrance, they all had a meal
together blessed by love and good manners; and
the boys still seething with wounded pride were
comforted.

But her husband could not refrain from a ” Did
I not say to thee, ‘Better not go’?” and her
heart echoed him feelingly. How much better
not to have gone!

That night she fought out her battle alone.
Well she understood the meaning of this rude-.
ness of all rudenesses. It was a public affront,
unforgivable from an Indian point of view, un-
forgettable. It has no English parallel. To set
before a guest at a public banquet an unwashed
knife and fork and a plate with remains upon it
would be discourteous enough. But this was
more. The religious element poisoned it. Cere-
monial uncleanness is abhorrent here. Over our
poor Mimosa swept great waves of longing for
her little Mayil, the child they had not cared
about enough to come to see her as he lay dying.
And she had gone to them in their sorrow, mean-
ing her very action to say: “I forgive you; let
us be friends.” They knew her going meant
that, and this was their reply.

She thought of the two rupees they had refused
to lend. That too she had forgiven. What was
the use of forgiving? Stung through her very
soul, she burned with shame as she lived through
the day in the darkness of the night. Had they
done it because she was known to be not as others
were, but one who loved the Christians’ God?
But they were Christians. Why, then, this cruel
affront ?

Was it because she was unjewelled? She had
not hired jewels to put in her ears (this would
have been thought polite, but to her had not
seemed honest).

Christians! Why were they so different from
their God? Within five miles of her where she
lay and wept was a true Christian man, pastor of
the church, good to all and tender-hearted as his
Master. And within that distance there were at
least two or three Christian women who would
have shown the Lord’s love to her, if only she
could have known them. But they were of
another caste and had no access to hers, unless
invited. And she knew nothing of them, nor
they of her; for an unknown world may be in
the house of our next neighbour, five miles may
contain an infinite distance. But Mimosa re-
membered the old woman who had been sent to
her in her need. She at least had been as a very
angel of God to her. Yes, but was this the
guidance she had promised? “In every least
thing He will wonderfully guide you.” Had she
been guided to that heartless house with its hate-
ful outrage? And as she saw it and felt it again,
hot shame scorched her. She had been flouted
in her brother’s house.

Why, oh why were hearts allowed to be so
unkind ? Nothing that had ever happened to her
hurt like this, and, the barriers of her self-control,
so painfully maintained through the morning and
all through the day, once broken down, she was
left to the mercy of heavy, sweeping waves of
grief. ” The waters compassed me about, the
weeds were wrapped about my head.” If she
had known the words they would have sounded
through her then, in her longing for her child,
her hurt at this rebuff, her loneliness of spirit
among those who could not understand. And
now to add to her distress she was conscious of
the working of a new passion within. What of
this flaming anger? Was anger right? Should
she not forgive ? But how could she forgive ?

At last, and suddenly, she remembered her
Lord.

“Remembering Thee, I straight forgot
What otherwhile had troubled me;
It was as if it all were not,
I only was aware of Thee.
Of Thee, of Thee alone aware,
I rested me, I held me still,
The blessed thought of Thee, most Fair,
Banished the brooding sense of ill.
And quietness around me fell–”

Oh, it is true, it is true. Whoso hath known
that comforting can bear witness it is true. He
who knew what it was to be wounded in the
house of His friends, He who turned not His
face from a shame which shames our hottest,
reddest shame, making it feel cool and pale, He,
though of all this she did not know, was with
her then. The thought of Him brought Him,
just a thought and He was there, softening the
sharp edges of the pain, soothing, tending, cool-
ing, comforting, till her soul was hushed within
her; she took heart to forgive; and she slept.

[b]The Fortunate Fourth[/b]

MIMOSA’S boys are full of character and very
lovable. The eldest is a thoughtful, upright
little lad, the boy who followed Mayil is a child
of delicate spirit. Then comes the treasured
Fourth, whom, from the first minute we saw him,
we called Mischief.

The fourth child, if a son, is supposed to bring
good fortune to a family. The fifth, if a daughter,
and the fourth, if a son, are the children of good
luck. Woe betide a family in which the fourth
child is a girl, or the fifth a boy. Children of ill
omen, cursed by the gods from their birth, they
bring misfortune upon all who belong to them.
Mimosa hardly let her Fortunate Fourth out of
her sight, and in fact never parted from him for
a day. He was the very light of her eyes.

The night before his birth she had been in sore
trouble. Her husband had fever in a distant
town, and she could not possibly go to him. In
vain she had tried to think of ways of helping
him. There was nothing she could do, and her
heart failed her. It was one of her darkest hours,
she could not see a light anywhere at all. She
tried to pray, but no words came. She could
only look up in the dark and say: ” O Lord, O
Lord!”

Then she fell asleep, and she dreamed that she
saw her babe, a boy, child of good fortune. He
was lying beside her on her mat, well, whole, and
good to look upon. And as she looked and loved
him, she saw a snake coil round him and then
glide under the door of the room and out of the
house into the street. And when she told her
dream, all united in assuring her that it was most
propitious. The snake was Saturn, god of ill-
luck. He had haunted her for many years, wit-
ness her tribulations, poverty, illness, the death
of her little peacock; but now all would change.
Had not Saturn departed?

And in the unaccountable way things happen
here, immediately after the boy’s birth her hus-
band, for the first time in his unfortunate life,
found a gold jewel lying on the open road and
brought it straight to her. They waited a while
and inquired for the owner; but she (it was a
woman’s jewel) could not be found. Then, feel-
ing it was clearly theirs, they had it made into a
necklet, a little bank, not very safe according to
our ways of thinking, but always at hand, within
sight, something visibly between oneself and
nothing. Given in such a way, it was doubly
valuable, and the husband was encouraged, and
the salt bazaar prospered, and Mimosa, who had
taken the gift from the God of gods and wore it
gratefully, was happy too. Verily he was stronger
than Saturn. If, indeed, the snake were that
malevolent influence, was it not He who had
caused it to depart?

[b]Mylo, The Bull That Went To Heaven[/b]

“AND soon after that the bull went to heaven.”

She was telling me the story of the years in a
gentle reminiscent way, and suddenly, with
almost startling emphasis, fell this sentence-
” The bull that went to heaven.” For she knew
something of that pleasant place; she had heard
of the lovely open gates and the walls whose
foundations were jewels and the bright streets
and the river and the trees. It is this picture of
glory and beauty that first holds the imagination
of the child and the childlike. Later conceptions
can wait. Did she see the golden pavement of
those wide streets trodden, as the streets of all
towns and villages are here, by leisurely saunter-
ing bulls, glorified probably to suit the place, but
still the bulls she knew? And if there were a
river and trees, there must be open country near,
many spreading miles of it. Why, then, not
bulls?

“Yes,” she continued dreamily, as if living
through that evening when her bull went to
heaven. ” Long, long ago, on a day of sorrow,
I had gone to a field of my mother. In hunger of
heart I went and in thirst, and the field was
called the Land of Precious Water. For near by
there was water where the workers could go to
drink, and always the cotton grew well there.

” In that field, in my thirst, I drank of precious
water; not the water of earth, for there indeed
my true God spoke to me. The cotton was
young then; it was the month after the sowing
and the plants were a span high. I hung my
baby’s hammock to the branch of an acacia. It
was covered with yellow flowers, such as always
come, balls of sweet-smelling yellow. I see it all
again.

” Now to me came that field for a year’s use,
and the salt bazaar prospered. We bought a pair
of ploughing bulls, and one of them was grey
and the other was brown. It was Mylo, the grey
one, that God took to Himself.

” But first great had been our gain. These my
hands weeded the field and tilled it; no idle
coolies did I call; with my own hands I tended
the plants and gathered the cotton and carded it.
So all the gains were ours. And they were far
larger than they had ever been before, so all the
people wondered. And my husband said : ‘The
first spending must be for thy ear jewels.’ So
they were bought.

” Then one evening at dusk, for no reason that
we knew, Mylo, the grey bull, turned from his
food, and he lay down, and God took him.

“We grieved. So much had we meant to do.
jt was not a little loss to us. But what would
you ? He was gone.

“Then like a light upon me fell a thought.
Must not all that the good God does be good for
the child that is His? Is any ill suffered to
approach? Then is not this good? What if
Mylo the bull had lived, should we not, perhaps,
have gone on desiring and, adding field to field,
become entangled in the love of earthly things?

” Then remembered I my husband’s elder
brother, the subtle one; gain to us could not be
without ravenous thoughts awakening in him.
Family feuds would have arisen. We should
have become enmeshed in new varieties of dis-
tresses. This foreseeing, had not my God, as a
Father going in the way before His children,
cleared a path for our feet, lest they should here-
after be caught in the net?

” Thus Mylo, the bull that went to heaven, was
to us a bull of blessing, not to be mourned over,
but accepted with tranquillity. And, wondering
at the wise ways of my God, I remembered the
saying of the old grandmother: ‘You will be
wonderfully led. In every least thing you will
be wonderfully led’”

It was not so difficult for her husband. He
took it as his fate, and Fate had never been very
kind to him. And this talk of his wife, though
curious, was comfortable to his ear; for, after all
eventually fields meant exertion, and exertion
was undesirable. Now they could be quiet. But
for the wife, with her sense of capacity and keen
adventurous spirit, it was a real trial at first, and
this thought was, as she said, like a light. She
knew nothing then of that particular provision of
grace that can enable us so to pass through things
temporal, that we finally lose not the things
eternal. So the thought came with a new com-
posing force, and ever after she looked back
lovingly on Mylo, the little grey bull that went to
heaven, marking a track for them all, as it were
with his four little hoofs.

[b]Siva’s Sign[/b]

BUT would they follow it? Kinglet, her first-
born son, had rubbed Siva’s ashes on his fore-
head.

Some distance from Mimosa’s village is a cele-
brated town which is a very fort of Hinduism.
Its temple dominates it from centre to rim; things
are done within its walls which could never be
written in a book. “Sodom? This is Sodom,”
said one who knew. In this town Mimosa’s
husband was now living with his disreputable
brother, and he took his eldest boy to live with
him there. Nothing Mimosa could do could
prevent it. The man was stubborn now with the
set will of the weak.

Among his friends was a rich merchant who
wanted a little boy to train as helper in the
bazaar. Kinglet was to be that little boy. But
first he must behave as a proper Hindu should.
He must rub Siva’s sign on his forehead. So his
father took him to the temple.

The temple in that town is a gigantic place.
Great pillared corridors, with sculptured columns
and carved stone roofs, and awful chambers with
doors that look as if all the powers that ever were
could not move them on their hinges. In the
glare of daylight it is overwhelming enough; at
night it is stupendous. It was night when the
father took his son, led him in through the
mighty doors past which only certain castes may
go, on to the far end of the darkness, where a
hundred lights twinkled round the inmost shrine.

And there he told the boy to rub on Siva’s
ashes, the Vibuthi that his dying grandfather had
refused. To do so would mark him a worshipper
of Siva.

Kinglet thought of his mother and shook his
head and tried to push away the ashes. But
what could a boy do against those tremendous
influences? His father “smote him with his
words.” The glimmering darkness did the rest.
He yielded, and the ashes were rubbed on for
the first time, and thereafter daily. Siva had
won.

And Mimosa heard of it. She went alone to
her little room of refuge. ” 0 my Father, can I
bear it? Will all end wrongly? It seems so,
my Father. I cannot understand it. I prayed
for something quite different. Will not my
prayer be answered?” And her tears fell as they
had never fallen even when Mayil was taken; for
this was a piteous thing and bitterer than death.
It was torture. Even now, long afterwards, when
her boy’s brow is washed clear, she can hardly
speak of it. Her very soul quivers at the memory
of it.

And then-and she does not know how to tell
of its coming; she only knows it came-peace
once more filled her heart. “I will not trouble
You with more askings,” she said aloud. (All
her communings with her Father were aloud,
except when sorrow or gladness passed beyond
the reach of words.) ” I will leave all I have
asked with You. Is it not Your concern ? Have
You not heretofore most wonderfully led me ? In
every least thing have You not led me ? Was not
that word that was spoken to me true? Then
why do I grieve like this now? I and mine, my
husband and my children, I think, Father, are
Your care. Is it not so? Then I need not be
afraid.” Perhaps the triumph of faith is too full-
toned a word for such an experience. But did
it not come near it?

And after that she rejoiced in any good thing
she heard about her little son; for example, that
he was the one boy the merchant had found who
was perfectly honest in word and deed. ” I had
said to my Father, ‘Let that be so; let there be
given to my children a perfect truthfulness.’ This
virtue He had given to Kinglet. The merchant
sold many things-cocoanuts and oils of all kinds,
and spices and fruits; but he could leave the
bazaar to my boy and knew all would be right
when he returned. The money taken he could
trust with him. When Kinglet left him he wept -
yea, wept-for he said : `Not another such shall
I ever find.’”

It was a sweet cupful of joy; but the one drop
of poison in the cup was the sight of the ashes on
her boy’s forehead when he came back, as he did
twice a year for five days, to see her. She would
rub the ashes off-she could do that-but she
could not keep them from being rubbed on again,
and all that was connoted by that one single sign
was grief and abhorrence to her. And she had
kept him pure from taint of idolatry from his
babyhood. And he was her first-born son

[b]The Unlucky Fifth[/b]

AND now crashed down on her a blow; nothing
she could do could ward it off from herself and
her beloved. Her fifth child was a boy.

The neighbours came to see. They compassed
her about like bees. They pitied her, they
blamed, according to their various dispositions;
they wagged their heads and turned up the palms
of their hands; and they prophesied terrible
things.

Poor Mimosa, she was not wiser than her
generation. Had she not seen disaster follow
upon the birth of her elder sister’s fifth child
(who was a boy)? And had not prosperity
attended her own family in the years following
Star’s birth; for Star was a fifth child, a daughter
of good fortune. To go no farther than her own
household, had not the finding of the jewel and
the blessing on the field followed the birth of her
fourth, the Fortunate Fourth?

She listened now, downcast, unable to escape
from the feeling that she had failed them all;
vague fears haunted her; she had no word of
excuse or of explanation for her fault.

” Let him perish. It is the only suitable thing
to do.”

“Give him away. Get rid of the danger. Give
him away.” For there are those in India who
welcome such gifts and train them for their own
purposes.

” Kill him.” There is a cactus hedge outside
that village where such children may be laid.
The crows find them and then the village dogs.

But Mimosa, true mother in every instinct,
could bear no more. “Let my baby perish?
Give him to a stranger? Kill him?” And her
voice rose at every question. ” Depart from me,
ye women. Be he ever so deadly a child of ill-
luck, he is my true God’s gift to me.” And she
snatched the baby from reach of their eyes and.
held him close to her breast. ” Go, go, go, and
come.” And she would have none of them.

And after they had gone, lamenting and
threatening, and explicitly announcing their
opinion of her, his poor fool-mother, she turned
to her God. Their Aiyo’s and Aiyaiyo’s deafened
her ears, distracted her soul, for every kind of
dreadful emotion can be crammed into that ex-
pletive. She could not speak for a while. And
then at last she found words, and she prayed that
her despised fifth might grow in strength and in
beauty, so that all must see he was fair to God.
The more they terrified her with their forebod-
ings, the more beautiful might he be. Oh, that
they might be compelled to admit her God was
stronger than all the gods, even the gods of ill-
luck — even Saturn, if indeed he had returned.

She gave him no name. What name could she
give to such a son? All Indian names have
known meanings, and a Tamil will change a
letter in a word rather than use it unsuitably. L
is a letter for feminine name endings, N for mas-
culine. When a Christian wants to call his off-
spring The Sorrows of Mary, if the child be a
girl, the Madonna is Marial; if a boy, Marian.
With the usual careful regard for the suitable,
Mimosa, not finding it, waited. But when, later
on, we suggested Gift of God, she was delighted.
That was exactly it.

Her prayer was answered, and the boy grew
strong and fair. He could sit up alone at six
months, and never ailed for an hour. Then
measles came to the village, and measles is to
India what smallpox is to England. All four
boys sickened, her jewel child nearly died, and
the baby boy lay in her arms a little bundle of
bones.

Would it have been wonderful if her faith had
failed? Her husband, though restored to sense
and sight, was entirely regardless of her distress,
and he never took the least interest in her precious
little fifth. She had not money to buy the reme-
dies prescribed by the barber who doctored the
village, and, what was much more serious, could
not buy the extra nourishment required by the
poor little fellows to fortify them to fight their
illness, and they got weaker and weaker. Kept
at home as she was now, she had even less money
than usual.

The temptation to give up the faith that
seemed to have failed and to resort to the ways
of those about her must have been tremendous
through those weeks. There were the demons of
disease to be appeased, and that vindictive god of
ill-luck. “Only a cocoanut and a few flowers!
Was it much to give to win health again for the
poor sick children?” said the voices around her
again; and again they urged charms to be bought
or found; one, sinless and inexpensive, a frog
which, if tied in a bag round the neck of the sick
and starved to death, gives its slowly departing
strength to the sufferer, at least should be tried.
There were many workers in magic among the
people of the village. They had ways of winning
help. Mimosa never doubted that. Nor can one
who has been among them doubt it either; ” they
also did in like manner with their enchantments.”
There are no obsolete words in the Book written
for all time. Call the strange powers exercised
by those who give themselves to evil by any name
you will, those powers are.

Mimosa knew where to turn for help-at a
price. But she would not pay that price, so she
was bombarded again by the ceaseless chatter of
the women : ” Return to thine own gods, and will
not thy troubles cease?”

“Fear not, 0 thou fool-woman, the gods are
merciful. Offer the appointed sacrifice, and all
will yet be well.”

“What hinders thee? See, thy days are as
the surface of the water that is stricken by the
wind. Wave after wave come thy distresses;
they chase one another. So it must be with those
who depise the ancient gods.”

“And thy father, art thou better than he? Or
wiser? Did he forsake the gods of his people?
Did he not hear the foreign talk and refuse it?
Art thou superior to thy father?” For that by
his last words he had confessed a faith, till then
hardly known to himself, had never occurred to
anyone.

“See her, the wisdomless!” they would con-
tinue relentlessly. And harder words came at
call, and they pushed her and struck at her and
trampled her down.

And she was as sensitive as the mimosa by the
roadside that the cattle tread down on their way
home in the evening. A breath, and a tremor
runs through the little thing; it can feel even the
changes in the air caused by thunder. Touch it,
and one by one the leaflets close, each pinna
droops and the leaf-stalk drops with a jerk.
Only the pretty lilac balls look up to the sun.
” It is dead,” says the child who sees it thus for
the first time; but it is not. By the ditch where it
grows, there is a trickle of water from the rice
fields. Nourished by this it takes heart again and
shows its delicate bravery, as if nothing rougher
than the flicker of a butterfly’s wings were in the
world at all.

Succour came to our human Mimosa. The
secret hidden waters flowed about her roots and,
like her namesake by the roadside, she took heart
to live again. The very trials that befell her were
turned to means of strength for her; by them she
proved her Father. For “if the work be of God
He can make a stepping-stone of the devil him-
self to set forward the work.”

All four boys recovered. “By my God was
their healing,” she said in speaking of it after-
wards. ” By Him alone it came, for none of the
things I would have done for them was I at that
time able to do.” And, moved by the love which
cannot rest without giving, unconcerned by ques-
tions about how the Lord of all the universe could
care to receive her trivial gifts, she sent part of
her first earnings, by the hand of her little boys,
to the church.

[b]The Ceremony Of The Corner[/b]

“THY father, art thou better than he? Or
wiser ?”

She had refused the word when they flung it
at her, but it rankled like a thorn in her soul, and
again and again she felt the hurt of it. And one
day, pitifully lonely, she seemed to walk back
through the years to the hour when she first
realized her father had indeed gone, never to
return.

It was just eleven days after his death, and the
Ceremony of the Corner had begun. She saw it
now, felt it, lived in it, was part of it again.

* * * * *

The doors and windows of the long, low living-
room are shut. The air is heavy with a smothered
smell of frankincense. There, in the dimly
lighted corner, is her father’s muslin scarf out-
spread. On it she sees his little, dear, own
things, his brass betel-box, his betel-nut parer,
and a morsel of lime. She sees his books too,
some of paper, some of palm-leaf strung in a
frame. His gold rings are there, and his silver
waist-chain, his sandals and umbrella. Is that
not his step in the house? Will he not open the
door and come in ?

But no, it is only women who are coming.
Mimosa sees them, all her women relatives to
uttermost degree; for this is the Women’s Fes-
tival ; no man comes near it.

Now the room is full to the doors. It is very
hot and stuffy. Each woman has a leaf in her
hand.

The doors are opening. Pressing through the
throng come Mimosa’s elder sisters. They are
spreading the feast for the Dead. Rice-cakes,
piles of knobbly sugar-balls, curly honey-cakes,
slabs of sticky, luscious gum, nutty lumps of moist
sugar. All except the rice-cakes are oily. Mimosa
smells the oily smells. Sesame and cocoanut mix
with the castor-oil that feeds the wicks afloat in
shallow cups in the tall brass lamp. Through
these mixed smells come little whiffs of frank-
incense.

Now by the flickering yellow light Mimosa sees
the women gather in a tight knot round the
white scarf in the corner. They are looking at
the little intimate things, and their hearts are
moved.

Mimosa is crying quietly. The sandals and
umbrella-why does he not need them for this
journey? Where has he gone?

Now one takes a censer and burns sweet spices
in it and drops incense on the flame, and slowly
censes the offerings. And each woman shakes
down her hair and, dipping her leaf into the in-
cense, lights a morsel of camphor and touches her
brow and breast and eyes with the ashes. And
she marks, each woman on her forehead, Siva’s
sign.

And they chant the death dirge, swaying back-
wards and forwards till they are exhausted.

Mimosa, tears falling fast, hair in masses down
her back, sways with them, chants the death
dirge too, cries to the father perhaps not yet out
of reach.

Then, with a quick change of feeling, the
women spring up, and Mimosa with them, dazed
as she is and startled; with them she twists up
her hair in a deft knot, picks up a fragment of
sweet or cake, goes out with the others to the
courtyard.

Now the clear blue is above them, and about
them the usual things of the day. They toss
their sweet things in the air, and call Ka, ka !
and the crows flock down pleased and noisy and
commonplace, and the wild frenzy of a moment
ago is as a dream when one awakes.

A little apart Mimosa stands, dazzled by the
bright light and the noise and the crows’ clamour.
And her mother pours into each outstretched sari
handfuls of the good things from that scarf in
the corner, and the Ritual of the Corner is
over.

* * * * *

Mimosa drew a deep breath. Why had she
been so long away? She shook herself im-
patiently, the day’s work must be done, she must
come back to it. But still she stood among the
shadows. The spell of the drone of the dirge was
upon her. She was breathing still the heavy air,
smelling the incense and the oils, seeing through
the bluish smoke the flicker of yellow light, the
white cloth, the brown and golden cakes and
sweets, and the dear familiar things, feeling the
clutch of them at her heart. Drugged by the
scent of the frankincense, she was one of those
swaying women still, chanting the dirge of the
dead.

As one writes, one is there oneself. Such
experiences are unforgettable. Where there is
real sorrow, it is as if love, longing, a wistful
wonder, pity, sympathy, and almost awe and fear
-for the things of the dead bring him almost
back-like so many strings of a delicate instru-
ment, lie exposed for the play of unseen fingers.
The women seem to spread their very being bare
to the influences of emotion. And then the
dramatic change, the sudden releasing of a too
taut string, the run out into the open and the
light-hearted tossing of the food to the vociferous
crows, the simple, sensible turning from the
clouded mysteries of death and grief to the
commonplace of pleasant food-who that has
shared it could forget? Back to their homes the
women go, laden with sweets for the children
there, and all is good and normal again. Only
the sorely bereaved mourn still. For them the
pain is a devouring thing that cannot be appeased.

But of the meaning of it all they hardly seem
to think. No one troubles to tell them that the
throwing of food to the birds, like the laying of a
ball of rice on the dead mouth, is for the nourish-
ment of the subtle body which is all that now
remains between the departed and absorption in
the universal soul. All the women know is that
somehow the dead are helped, for a faith in life
after death continues imperishable in the human
heart, and they trust their dead live somewhere.
But Mimosa, coming slowly back from that hour
of memories, longed to know more, to be sure;
ached in every fibre for her father; above all,
yearned, burned with desire to know if indeed he
had turned to her own true God at last. He had
passed with only that one unexplained word : ” I
go to the Supreme.”

Could it be that he had accepted the truth,
though at the very threshold of death? “0
father,” she had almost cried, and then stopped,
knowing nothing of any such appeal, and turning
to the ever-living Father she rested her heart on
the knowledge of a love that she had proved and
could lay hold upon, undismayed by unanswered
questions. ” You know all these matters, my
Father, to You are not all such things perfectly
known? And as for me, I cannot leave You.
No, not even if my own mortal father did not
know You, can I leave You. You are known to
me, my Father. And will You not take care of
us, these my children and me?”

[b]The Empty Oil Bottle[/b]

SHE was not through her troubles. That
treacherous illness had left weakness in its wake.
An affection of the skin attacked all four boys,
the poor baby was covered with sores and wailed
day and night. Lavish anointing with oil would
have helped: but the oil bottle was empty, and
she could not afford to buy in anything like suffi-
cient quantity.

That was a painful hour. She could have
borrowed the oil; but the strange instinct in her,
uncommunicated by anything ever heard (and,
as we know, she could not read), drew her back
from borrowing. ” Our God knows, and He will
give it to us. He will help me to earn more, give
me more strength. If it be good for us, this He
will do,” she said to her little boys.

But that night, as she saw the poor little fellows
distressed and crying, she must have been sharply
tempted. Ever since they were born, she had
sent thank-offerings by one of the children to the
God of the Christians whom she also worshipped.
Sometimes the gift was a small silver coin, some-
times a handful of salt, firstfruits, as it were, of
the season. The child laid it on the tray set for
such gifts and came away, no one inquiring.
Never had anyone thought anything of these
gifts, they were not published in any list. They
went into some general fund, unnoticed, except
that sometimes somebody would remark in a dim,
wondering kind of way : ” Why does this heathen
woman send offerings to our church?”

But now all was different. If a trifle of these
often hardly spared gifts had been kept back, the
children would not be crying now. The poor
mother pulled herself together. Such thoughts
must never enter. She went to the little boys,
made them kneel on their mats: ” Our God can
help even in this,” she said, and she prayed,
prayed for healing, for relief from the unendur-
able irritation which kept them awake, for help
for herself that she might be strong to work and
buy what was required, for comfort for them all.
Soothed and consoled, the children fell asleep.

But the oil?

Through all these years her sisters had never
thought of sending her anything. It was partly,
perhaps, that they lived far away and knew little
of her struggles, partly, it may be, they knew the
temper of her mind and did not care to risk send-
ing an unwelcome gift. She, of course, had never
spoken of her difficulties to them; if they knew
anything, they heard it from others.

For Mimosa, careful of her God’s good name,
said nothing to those who would not understand.
” I know His love, how could I doubt Him? But
if I had told them they would have said, ‘Ah,
your God is not so good as ours. See, we lack
nothing.’”

But now, in their distant town, to the two
sisters came a thought of Mimosa and her chil-
dren, and moved by some kindly, sisterly feeling,
they sent twice during that period small, but
blessedly welcome gifts. (For so coming who
could refuse them?) The oil bottle was filled,
and there was enough to buy other necessities of
the moment. Cheered and warmed to the heart
(but she would have said cooled ), Mimosa
thanked God and took courage.

And in this way, by prayer and in confidence,
this untaught Indian woman dealt with all the
emergencies of life, taking sickness, when it
came, direct to Him, and looking to Him to heal.
She never seems to have worried over petty ques-
tions about the use of means. She would have
opened her brown eyes wide with wonder, had
anyone suggested that the good eucalyptus oil
which can take the pain from a scorpion sting
within one minute, was less a gift of her kind
Father than the rice was, and the vegetable curry
which nourished her little sons.

In a world where she had never walked, Chris-
tians were thinking and writing about healing in
answer to prayer. Of all this, of course, Mimosa
had not heard the lightest whisper, nor had she
heard a single story of the healing virtue of our
Lord. But, taught by the Spirit, she was led
straight to the heart of the matter. To her faith,
unperplexed by the talk of men, it seemed a
natural thing that He should heal. And, though
relief did not always come at once, peace did.
“And is not peace of more importance?” she said
in her sweet simplicity.

When asked to explain why some did not re-
cover-her little Mayil, for example-she turned
tranquil eyes upon the questioner. She did not
know; but her God did. So must it not be well?
And that was her answer continually about many
puzzling matters. With a turn of the hands
which, in Tamil, talk as much as the tongue, and
a smile that illuminates her otherwise serious face,
she says it now. Or she glances up with a quick
“Father, You know. It is well, I think, Father;
it is certainly well.”

Does it read like a story made up, or at least
touched up a little? But I have never con-
sciously written an untrue line, and a story, even
ever so little coloured, would be untrue.

And is there any need, even if it were allowed,
to invent or to colour where the truth of God is
concerned? Are not His doings, shown just as
they are, quite beautiful? “Impossible” things
are continually happening, for He has not gone
away from His world.

[b]Redeemer, Christ, Command Thy Double Healing[/b]

Nor has He left Himself without witnesses.

Mimosa’s village is well known to the police. The District Superintendent of Police once told us that there was more crime there and round about the village than anywhere else in the district. He told us stories such as only such men can tell, stories that would make weird books if anyone had the time to write them. And in the thick of this lived Mimosa and her children. But in the Clan, thus notorious for every kind of dare-devilry, was that gentle cousin, who had read Star’s letter to Mimosa. No one had ever heard him say a rough word, and round about him there was a little quiet place always.

And it was he who, time and again, was a witness to the universal love of God whose poor children had forgotten Him and were becoming so terribly like the gods they had fashioned.

One day Mimosa, who had been slowly failing for some time, became very ill. Somehow she struggled through the cooking of a kind of food that would keep good for nearly three days. She had hardly got it made when she collapsed, and for three days she lay helpless. No one knew, and no one came to see her. Her frightened little boys kept close to their poor mother, not understanding what was the matter, and, when meal-times came, they took the food she had prepared before she was too ill to move. But she had nothing. She could not eat.

And she could not rise and spread her sari to the Lord; but that was her spiritual attitude. Her soul knelt.

“Send help, I ask you, Father. I am sure you know how things are with me. And You know I should get up and look after my children. But see, I cannot get up. The pain holds me down. Kindly allay it, Father. This is what I ask You to do, that I may rise and look after my children and the house.”

On the third day a neighbour looked in and gave the alarm. Mimosa seemed to her eyes to be dying. She had the dreaded death-delirium. “She is dying, she is dying !” she cried, rushing out into the street.

And her cousin, the man of quietness, heard. Quickly he ran for a vessel of oil and, going straight to where she lay, began to anoint her with it, rubbing her gently in the Indian way. And to the amazement of the people who by this time had gathered for the last scene, she sat up.

Then her cousin went for food, and fed her children, who had just begun to be hungry, and to her he gave the rice-water given in illness; but she was soon ready for proper food, for “healing had come, even health. I had no pain and soon was strong again.”

And she told how astonished the people were; but to her sweet and simple faith it was wonderful so much as kind.

When she came to us — for that joy is only a few chapters ahead, she lighted upon a time of new experiences with us, for healings given in answer to prayer, such as we had not had before in the same definite and public way.

And hymn sung at these meetings has a chorus which runs thus:

“Touch them, O Lord,
Touch them, O Lord,
We kneel and pray Thee, touch them,
Oh, touch them, Lord.”

And it goes on:

Redeemer, Christ, command Thy double healing :
For soul and body are in Thy sight are dear.”

At a time of preparation for one of these meetings Mimosa sat with her calm, fixed gaze on the speaker. There was such a look of comprehension in her face that it was as if she had been through it all before. And this though she was only just beginning to learn what our five-year-old children “had known ever since they were quite little,” as one of them remarked. “She cannot even say the twenty-third psalm off by heart,” said another, astonished. It was true. She had lingered for days brooding over the first two verses, which seemed to her so beautiful that she could not hurry to go past them. And yet, veriest babe as she was in knowledge of the letter of Scripture, she seemed to have drunk very deep of its spirit, and here she was meeting us more than halfway in this, as in everything else. So the one who was speaking asked her if she would some time tell what she knew of our Lord Jesus Christ as Healer.

She smiled, and the smile that filled her grave eyes was like a glint of light on a mountain pool. And sitting by the well the next evening, while the children washed their saris , she told me the story just written down, feeling it would make it easier to tell it “in the great congregation” if she told it alone in the quiet like this.

But the joy of her heart was not only, or chiefly, in the healing of the body experienced in her village home, or seen now. It lay, it lies, in the blessed truth that the Lord, coming thus near to a company of His children, does, in a way impossible to describe to those who have not known it, convey a new, fresh sense of His presence and His love and His power to those thus brought into contact with Him. Mimosa had heard her son, him on whose brow Siva’s ashes were rubbed, ask here” :And is it really true ? Will He heal my soul as He has healed these childrenn’s bodies ?” He had seen the one done; he was awakened to believe in the other.

It was this that filled his mother’s eyes that evening with a light that cannot be expressed in terms of earth’s poor lights. It was starlight, moonlight, dawn, all in one; it was heaven’s light we saw in her dark eyes then.

[b]The Fears Of Love[/b]

Do love and fear always walk up and down together in a mother’s heart ? Mimosa never knew what it was to be without fear for her little sons. She knew the perils of an Indian street. Thick as the dust on it, those perils lay about her boys. She could not forget the indelible impressions etched deep upon the mind of a young child by the sights and the sounds of the street.

Far back in memory lay a dreadful day when her father found his eldest son bringing into his own clean house boys with minds that were open sewers. He seized the wretched youth, tied him to a pillar in an upper room, and scourged him with a rope. Then, in his desperation, he did the most extreme thing known to Hindu fathers in the way of punishment. It is meted out sometimes to lads who want to follow Christ and have confessed at home. He put pepper in his eyes.

But vain, vain is all without the power of the cleansing Spirit to deal with the heart within. The boy was forbidden the privileges of the house, his mother and sisters saw little of him. The father wrestled alone with his trouble; his son had wasted his property, but that was nothing to this; and when at last the abject one declared his intention of joining the Way, his father smiled a grim smile; the Church was welcome to him.

The boy arrived at our bungalow on the Iyer’s birthday. Not a hint of his past was allowed to filter through to us; nor was his motive — desire for education for commercial purposes — discoverable at once. He was received as a birthday gift from heaven, a new oppurtunity; with joy and with love he was welcomed; and he lived to make more scars in hearts that had trusted him and toiled for him. Such are the griefs of angels, the shame of Christ. This boy, a man now, was back in his village, and he stung Mimosa with wasp stings of sharp words whenever he had a chance.

But she did not mind that, if only she could keep her boys from him and such as he. So she watched over them, combining that vigilant mother-duty with all else that she did.

They were almost always with her; for there was no one who felt as she did, with whom she could leave them. They helped her with her housework, though that was against custom; for in India boys are served, they do not serve.

At first they rather demurred.

“Buy a little sister for us,” they said to her one day. “So-and-so and So-and-so” — naming boys of their acquantiance — “have little sisters who sweep the house for them and polish the brass vessels and help to cook. If we had one we need not work at all.”

Mimosa smiled. In her wise heart she felt it was no bad training, this unusual training of the house, and she told the little boys it was all right. They helped her so nicely she really did not need to buy a little sister.

[b]“Shall I Be Offended With You ?”[/b]

But the children’s long illness had drained her resources, and there came a night when once again there was no food to give them.

She remembered the refused two rupees. She would not risk man’s rebuff again. “It will be enough, I think, if I tell my Father,” was the word that lay deepest within her. But the noontide hour passed foodless; there was not a grain of rice or a single little green vegetable in the house. It was a time when it was impossible for her to go out to work.

She drew her little sons beside her. She had taught them that their Father would never forsake them, she had taught them to pray; from their babyhood they had knelt with her on their mats and followed her simple petitions. She had taught them to thank God before food, in the Christian way, for she had, in that one afternoon long ago, seen her sister do so. “We have praised our God when we had food, ” she said to the boys as they looked up hungrily and rather tearfully. “Now let us praise Him when we have none.”

Then they knelt together. “O God, O true God, O Father, we worship You, we praise You.” And she asked that contentment might be given to them, and sleep.

The boys lay down, and they fell asleep; but the mother could not sleep. Hour after hour she knelt before her God, holding our her sari in the old way, and remembering her father’s proverb, these were the words she said:

“If the gardener has to water a great many plants, will he not sometimes forget one little plant ? My children and I are Your plants. You have the whole world to look after; I think perhaps you have forgotten us to-night. But never mind. (The word is half apologetic. Who am I that I should mention it ? ) Shall I be offended with You ? Only I ask You to be as a the hen with her little chickens. Gather us under Your wings.”

It was now near midnight. The house was far too poor to keep a light burning; the little boys had prayed in the dark, and gone to sleep in the dark; and these words and many more –for she knelt there for a long time — were spoken in the dark. The darkness is full of demons to the people of the South. I have gone out in cholera time down the unlighted streets of the villages of Dohnavur, tapping at the doors of the houses were the worst cases lay, and I have never known the door open without a cautious minute of frightened question from the inside. “We were afraid of the demons,” would be the apology as at last the door opened and let me in.

Now through the dark streets, lighted only by the stars, came the sound of footsteps. They stopped at her door.

“Sister !”

She knew the voice and opened quickly. There, standing against the velvety star-sprinkled sky, she saw that same cousin who had been sent to her before. She had carefully kept the knowledge of her circumstances from him, for he was not a believer in her God.

“Hast thou any food ? Have the children any food ?” he asked.

What could she say ? She knew her God had sent him and throbs of joy shook her so that she could hardly speak. He had not forgotten; the Gardener had not forgotten His little plants.

But His honour was concerned in this matter, and she was very jealus fro the honor of the Lord her God; so she hesistated for a moment.

“See,,”" she said, pointing to the sleeping boys, as the starlight coming in through the door showed them on their mats. “We are happy. That is the chief thing, even more important than food. The children cried a little at first, but see, they are asleep. Our God has comforted them. Is not contentment more precious than food ?”

But the cousin would not be denied.

Then she lighted a wick floating in a saucer of oil and woke the boys. In the yellow flicker those wondering children saw a brass vessel piled with white rice, and a joyful heap of the nice curried vegetables their little souls had yearned for, set on the top of the heap. The cousin could not explain why he came. All he knew was that he could not go to sleep, something in him kept on wakening him and stirring him to take that food at once, till at last he yielded, went to the place where the rice over from the evening’s meal was kept, and, filling the brass vessel, brought it to them.

[b]I Know Him By Suffering[/b]

And so the last months passed before we were to meet. Her cousin was always kind to her. The rest of the world had only one word , turned on her always the same hard face. But it grew more and more difficult to guard the boys; and, as they began to understand and ask questions, and the pain of a divided house became more insistent, all the mother-love in her burned in one pure flame of desire that they should have what she had never had, the chance to learn fully of the true and living and holy God and themselves to choose His worship.

But how could it be accomplished ?

She gave herself to prayer. Streaming through the busy day, flowing far into the night, not always in words, for such longings as consumed her cannot wait for words: “I am a prayer”

This could not be wholly unknown to her world, and one day her brother, he to whom so much had been given, taunted her thus

“Thou to think that thou canst pray ! From whom hast thou learned ? Thou canst not read, thou the ignorant who canst not even read the first letter (and he named it mockingly), thou to think that thou canst pray !” And he sniffed. She turned her wistful eyes upon him. He knew so much. If he would only teach her ! But far from him was such a thought.

She was only a poor woman, she said humbly to herself; she knew nothing at all. What if this her learned brother said were true ? What if it were all a mistake ? Sharply then and deep the sword entered into her soul, and that miserable brother thrust it again, twisting it around with malicious intent as his laugh rang down the street.

“Wilt Thou be indeed to me as waters that fail ?” Did her heart cry that at this hour ?

“I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.”

She had never heard the words, knew nothing of the truth that reinforces our fainting spirits. But wonderful, wonderful are the ways of the Lord. He is here, sometimes revealed to us, sometimes hidden, but always a God at hand and not a God far off. Near at that moment was the Lover of souls.

“Have I been a wilderness unto thee ?”

Then with a warm glow of joy she knew what He had been to her all through the bitter years. “You know Him by learning,” she said one day to Star, “but I know Him by suffering.”

It was a true word. She did not mean that Star knew Him by learning only, for Star has suffered too; but her reverent gaze was on Star’s Bible and many books, and she knew that riches of knowledge lay in wonderful heaps in those rooms which she had never entered. “But I know Him by suffering.” That poignant little word tells all.

No, He had not been a wilderness ot her; He had comforted all her waste places; He understood that she had never learned to pray and did not know even the first letter of the Tamil alphabet, so had He not Himself taught her how to speak to Him, even as a mother teaches her little child ? And then, as if to reassure her, He came again in another small, gentle act of kindness like that of the midnight meal.

[b]The Five Rupee Notes[/b]

Not that Mimosa talked lightly on these matters. She seemed to have learned “to guard the inner wealth from the squandering of common talk.” But when she discovered, to her joyful surpise, that His children here were constantly proving His care even in these the ordinary needs of life, we met on common ground; and thus were drawn from her some of her own experiences to which we listened, wondering at the variety of our Lord’s loving-kindnesses, what one might call the ingenuity of love.

And, wondering more, we remembered that single afternoon so many years ago, with its medley of impressions; the excitement of the first look round a Christian house, the eager joy of being with her sister, the giving of that little fragment of truth with such a small hope on our part that so little could do anything (but oh, imperishable is every fragment of God’s eternal truth !) and then the blinding grief of the last ten minutes, which seemed as if it must have swept out of mind that one little fragment. Who could have thought that anything planted in such a confusion and upturn of circumstances would have lived, and put forth roots, and grown, and budded as a rose growing by a brook of water ? Who would have thought it possible ? How could it have been possible but for the unimaginable loving-kindness of Jesus Christ our Lord ?

And now, when things were hardest, came this new touch, as of a hand on her little affairs, that assured her of His presence. But assured is not the word. Have we a word for the incoming of that sweet sense of being taken care of, loved, not forgotten ? Perhaps such sweetness passes earth’s poor words.

Mimosa’s house-roof is made of palm leaves, and these require frequent renewal. If they are not renewed as soon as they begin to “go”, the roof leaks. And a leaky roof is a very miserable thing. “Though one may stay in the house of sorrow, to be in a leaky roof is impossible,” says the proverb.

Hers needed repair. Five rupees (between six and seven shillings) would buy leaves enough to make all safe before the heavy rain of the northeast monsoon, rain that empties itself on these plains in solid sheets of grey water, till life in our foolish South India is one great shiver. For we build for sunshine her, and improvidently forget rain and cold, except in that matter of palm-leaf roofs were try to keep them water-tight.

But food was dear, adn the boys, who were growing fast, consumed a great deal of it; food came first, roofs second; Mimosa could not spare that five rupees. And yet the roof must be repaired. She tried hard to earn more money, but she had touched her limit. Not another copper could she add to the day’s incoming. But no one knew. “Only my God, He knew.”

In the beautiful old Tuscany story, Suora Marianna, tired out after nursing a poor sick woman, fell asleep while the food she was cooking for her was still on the fire. But the Child Christ came and cared for that little pot of good, and it was not spoiled.

“Oh, the Lord has many a way
That His children little think of,
To send answers whn they pray
He had finished all she failed in.”

Not in legend only, in real everyday commonplace life, these things are happening still. Only we do not always see the Christ or His holy angels in the house or in the street. Perhaps we forget to look for them. Perhaps this story is meant to be a witness to the invisible.

One day, while Music and Mischief, the Fortunate Fourth, were playing near the house, a wedding procession passed with a beautiful braying band and much shouting. After the dust had subsided, Music, who had been enjoying the mad racket to the full, saw some small pieces of paper lying in the middle of the village street.

In a house where letters never come — the one exception was that precious letter from Star, now stored away in the box — where there are no newspapers or pamphlets, paper has to be bought by the farthing’s worth in the bazaar. The boy pounced on his treasure-trove; just the thing for holding safely the sticky brown palm-sugar which from time to time his mother gave him for a treat.

But one of the pieces was dirty. He left it, and a less fastidious playfellow picked it up.

“Mother, mother !” he cried, running into the house. “Look at what I have found.” And he suggested that she might keep the five little slips of nice stiff paper for his sugar.

His mother took the crisp little slips form him, and noticed they were curiously cut and marked.

“This is not common paper,” she said to the boy, who waited eagerly; and, remembering that she had heard talk of paper money, though she had never seen it, she wondered if this could be that, and took the slips to a neighbour. Each one was a rupee note. The others carried off by her boy’s playfellow was for two and a half rupees. In her hand lay five rupees, the five rupees she wanted. Mimosa thought of her roof; but it might be possible to find the owner, so she waited.

Soon the story was noised abroad, and a man came to her door. Yes, her little boy had found the notes, she said, and she went to get them. But tender, tender are the mercies of the Lord. The man smiled and shook his head. “Let the little one keep them,” he said, and went his way.

Thus continually, unfailingly, she was helped, and she went on in the quietness of a sure confidence. Was ever one less defended ? But it was to the city that had no moat or river that the great word came: “But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams.”

The story loses sadly in the writing. First there is the poverty of bare words without any of the tender touches of living telling. And then there is the loss of even what little those same poor words can capture, as they are hammered out in type and sewn up in a book. With every change of element something eludes one, floats away like a fragrance in the air, vanishes like colour on the mountains when the living light of dawn passes into ordinary day. Often I have stopped and longed that this rare look into the life of an Indian woman might be given by means of some other sense than that of eye or ear. When shall we be able to think our tales across the sea ?

[b]Star’s Burden[/b]

And now, away in Dohnavur, on Star, still unaware of all this, was laid a great burden of prayer. Mimosa and her little sons were never far from her mind. She longed to write to her and propose that she should come and see us. Over and over again she had all but written, and then “it was if my hand were pulled back,” she said in speaking of it afterwards, and she laid her left hand on her right hand and held it, drawing it back, “like this; it was like this, I could not write, and I thought of Uzzah and the ark, and I felt I must not touch this matter, which was not mine but belonged to God.”

Then she began to pray that to the boys themselves the desire to come might be given (for the desires of little sons have a certain weight with their parents quite out of proportion with their importance). This prayer lay on her for three months and then came four days’ fever. She was shut up to prayer.

It was a strange experience. She earnestly wanted to be well, for there was no one to do what she had to leave undone. But it was as if one work only were given to her to do. She was to live with God for Mimosa. Gradually a great peace grew in her heart, and though the thought of her sister and her sister’s children was with her all the time, the sense of burden was gone.

On the fifth day it was “as if the Lord Jesus came into the room.” There was not the usual convalescence. She was at once quite well. He touched her hand and the fever left her; and she arose and ministered.

Letters from her old home take a week to reach Dohnavur. Within a week from that fifth day when healing was granted, a letter came from Mimosa, the first Star had ever received from her. It had been written at different times during the four days of her fever.

What takes place in the spiritual realm when such things happen ? How little we know of that which moves in and out of our ways, and hems us in on every side.

[b]Blockhead[/b]

But we must look back a little to see how by simplest means causes are set in motion that lead to answered prayer.

Down in the dusty, noisy world a boy of fourteen sat in the stuffy twilight of a back room opening off an Indian bazaar. He was wrestling with accounts which would not come straight. He toiled earnestly, piling up little heaps of copper and silver and counting them over and over again; but there was some queer muddle somewhere, and they refused to square with the roughly scrawled figures on the tally. He was baffled.

“Blockhead !” said his father tersely. “Blockhead !”

It was too much for the boy.

“Is it just, is it fair,” he flamed out, “to call me `blockhead’ when you have never sent me to school ? Let me go to Dohnavur and learn !”

If towards the end of a festivall day a cracker had walked across the street and gone off exactly under him, the father, a man of repose as he was, would have jumped. He jumped now, mentally speaking, and he stared at the boy, flabbergasted. Dohnavur !

From that day on the idea laid firm hold of Kinglet, and when he saw his mother he told her of it. She saw in it the answer to the longings of her heart. Of Star’s, of course, she as yet knew nothing.

But the letter, written by dictation, told Star that for some time — “for about three months,” Star read with awe — her oldest boy had been beseeching to go to Dohnavur. Might she bring him ? Might she bring her second boy, too ? She wanted to give them to God. Her husband had consented. When might she come ?

“About three months.” It could not be a mere coincidence; but Star, who has all her life gone to the bedrock of things, knew that such words as “I give my sons to God” might mean much or very little, and she did not, let it be remembered, know anything of all we know of those brave years. She did not know that Mimosa was a worshipper of our God.

But she did know that the Hindu father did not fear that his boys would become true and earnest followers of Christ. Had he not seen many a lad, his own nephews, for example, sent to school to be educated, returned in the holidays to be subjected to all the ancient influences, finally turned out, what ? Christians, perhaps, but keeping caste as of old, which after all is the great matter, dealing with life in the Hindu way, not trammelled by Christian principles when they proved inconvenient; in fact, much like their fore-bears only more or less educated. Who fears veneer ? Not the Hindu father who knows the firm quality of the wood below. He would not deny that there have been a few exceptions. But they are not frequent enough to cause alarm.

Star wrote, therefore, explaining clearly that this, as an end of education, did not even come into our thoughts. And she told them our aim, even the conversion of the children, their deliverance from caste, and their devotion to the service of Christ; and she explained what the means were, which we felt led most directly to this end.

It was a hard letter to write, for it seemed to shut the door and turn the key in the lock. It would have been harder still to write, could Star have known what lay behind that letter of Mimosa’s, seen the marks of the tears on it, felt the throb of the years in it. These were for the moment hidden from her. But she did greatly long to have the handling of her sister’s boys, and there was one moving word; a dictated letter can tell so little, but Mimosa referred to her childhood’s desire, and said perhaps it was to be fulfilled in these her sons.

Back went Star’s answer, slowly as letters go through country places, and at last it reached Mimosa. Who with even the faintest flicker of imagination can fail to see her, as she listened to the unimpressive readiing of it by her husband ? Star had thought it would almost certainly close the door. It had taken no common courage to write it. All Mimosa’s courage was needed to hear it read slowly and disapprovingly. Word by word it dropped into her heart like lead. It was impossible that her husband would ever agree to this.

But her Father would hear the prayer of His child. How often He had heard ! Deep in her spirit there was peace; she prayed again.

And the impossible happened. We call the opening of the iron gate of Peter’s prison a miracle. We know something of iron gates. We also know something of the Hindu, not as he is in the modern and modified India, but as he is in his own fastness of caste; we know that no iron gate that ever was hung is more firmly padlocked than is his mind where such things are concerned. Futile as the father had proved himself to be, poor-spirited as he undoubtedly is, he was and is a Hindu. He would have had his caste behind him had he said “No.” And yet he said “Yes,” and Mimosa wrote that they would come. Her heart sang with the birds that day.

[b]As A Red-Hot Wire In The Ear[/b]

But he went back on his promise.

All this happened when I was from home, held away by a particularly difficult work, so Star did not add these matters to the burdened days; knowing I would be with her in whatever sheh did, she waited till she knew what was to come of it. For in our happy little world of Dohnavur we have never even talked of beiing one. We began by being one. “Brown and white, white and brown, all mixed together” as the children’s song has it. But it is closer than that; we are “one’d”.

For weeks she heard nothing. Then a piteous little letter came from Mimosa, dictated to her brother whom she had persuaded to write. It told of the husband’s consent, then refusal because of the caste’s resistance, and yet, in the quietness of faith, she was apparently preparing for the hour when the gates would open. “Under hopeless circumstances he hopefully believed”: it was that. There was not a glimmer of light in her sky. But in order to be ready to start at a moment’s notice she had sold her brass vessels, an Indian woman’s most precious necessities. They had been her father’s gift to her, part of her dowry, and she could never buy such again. Hereafter she must use cheap earthen pots. She did not say this, but we knew it.

With the money thus realized she had prevalied upon her worthless brother to escort them, “when her God should direct her goings”; part of it was to be spent in providing for hsi little girls whom he terribly neglected, part on the journey. She hoped to come soon, she wrote.

Many days passed, and Mimosa did not come. What had happened ? A thousand things might have happened; but of all vain ways of spending time perhaps the vainest is to wonder over might-be’s, as one of the saddest is to dwell on might-have-been’s.

Afterwards we heard it all.

The caste had continued its coercion. Held as she was, and unable to explain herself in the very least to them, she suffered. In this old land where days speak and the multitude of years teaches wisdom, the talk of the people is strewn with proverbs about the pain of cruel words: they are like red-hot wire thrust into the ear; like blisters of fire on the ear; like nails hammered sharply into the softness of unseasoned wood; piercing as arrows. Words hurt more than blows, to be hurt with words is like being beaten by wind and rain together. Every contact with the world outside her house was now, as never before, embittered for Mimosa. And it had been bitter enough before. In speaking of it she said simply;” I lived before the Lord again with my sari in my hand.”

Who could have succoured her then but a Saviour who had suffered ? Are there not times in life when nothing less suffices ? By the Gate which is called Beautiful we may find joyful access to the God of all beauty. But not till we reach the city whose every several gate is one pearl, shall we find only joy as we enter in. Yea, and all that live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. Sooner or later we must all come to the place where we hear a voice that is deep with unfathomable pain, call us to the fellowship of suffering.

But there we find Him. And who but Jesus, crucified, risen Redeemer, could suffice us there ?

“I have in my study pictures of Millet, Goethe, Tolstoy, Beethoven, and Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane,” wrote a Chinese student, not yet a Christian, to his friend in Paris. “After seeing a beautiful picture, reading some wonderful poetry, or hearing some exquisite music, my spirit goes out, not to Jesus, but to the pictures of the other famous men. But when my heart is in trouble, these can no longer charm; only my contemplation of Jesus in His agony in the garden seems able to bring me peace.”

“For hadst Thou passionless
Spent easy days, O Christ, known only joy’s
dear kiss,
Walked on safe sandalled feet
In meadowlands — Ah, who that ever ran
Naked across the plain,
Scourged by the vehement, bitter rain,
But turning to Thee desperate, would miss
Something in Thee, yea, vital things ? Tears were Thy meat,
A stear-stab Thy caress,
Thou suffering Son of Man.”

[b]Bind On Thy Sandals[/b]

At that time her husband was living in a town some ten miles distant from the caste village of her clan. She could have come to us without his knowledge, but, straighforward as her father, it never occurred to her to do so. Her loyalty to that feeble-spirited man, who mooned away his days and left her to keep the family, had never for one instant wavered. Of such fine stuff are the women of India made, trained through hard generations of a disciplined unselfishness that is surely matchless among the nations of the earth.

Then suddenly, she knew she had to come. She could not explain this strong sense of being compelled; she only knew so it was. “I had to come,” she said.

And we who listened wondered if the angel who found Peter long ago had shone upon her and wakened her from an almost trance of prayer, though indeed it was no trance, for body and mind were strained to utmost activity. However it was, chains fell from off her. “Bind on thy sandals,” said that calm angel long ago, so unhurried, though every moment was precious. Calmly she made her arrangements now; and, visibly escorted by the brother who had so often thrust at her invisibly, as we believe, by the blessed mighty angel, she passed through the various wards of her caste-bound little city; and the iron gate that lead out of it opened, as iron gates do where angels are; and she, with her baby in her arms and her three little sons walking beside her while the brother she had bribed attended them, took the road that led to the town where her husband was, not knowing what would befall her there.

They were tired when they reached the town of the great Hindu temple. Go down those streets in the early morning, see the haughty Brahman faces glancing at you superciliously from behind the iron bars that guard the verandahs where they sleep on polished wodden slabs. Rising on their elbows they survey the passers-by with a look that must be experienced to be understood. It is the very essence of distilled superiority. Walk down the amazing corridors of that amazing temple, and you will need to summon all your faith to believe that the day will ever come in India, when judgment shall run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

To this town in her weakness, a thing of shame aas her people saw her, Mimosa went now, past the great temple walls, and she looked up at them. They had looked down on her boy when they rubbed ashes on his forehead. Let even the boldest look at them, and they seem to turn his most tremendous assault to a shower of snowflakes. And as Mimosa walked past them, she felt her faith assailed from all sides by those enormous buildings. I have stood on the step leading into the inner shrine of that temple. I have talked with fierce and sensual men, and to some too of the kind who bring to remembrance the young man whom Jesus, looking upon, loved. But never once have I talked to one whose being was not visibly impressed by the influence of the massive piles about him. Mimosa felt its subtle forces now, and the presence of the man beside her accentuated this sense of impotence. He had tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and no change had passed over his spirit. In the long war between good and evil, who was triumphing ? So far as she could see, the devil, not Christ.

[b]Not In Despair[/b]

Star reached her husband’s house in the late evening, and immediately was flung body and soul into a very cauldron of confusions. The place was boiling over with excitement, for the news of her intention had run before her and stirred up the sluggish husband and his neighbours, and the house was filled in a moment.

“Stark madness — abominable, soul defiling, caste-destroying ! Better throw thy children in the river or a well, or toss them into the jungle.” And they all raved together, heaping curses, protestations, denouncements on poor Mimosa’s head with great clamours of loud voices and a frenzied flinging about of arms and hands, and glaring of angry eyes; and she stood undefended in the midst.

For hours the furore continued. They knew of the secret medicine the Dohnavur people used. It was a white powder. It was given to make people Christians. It would be given to the children just as, long ago, some such medicine had been given to the boys’ unfortunate mother. Had she not been most peculiar ever since ? The boys would clean forget everything good and destroy their caste by actions not to be tolerated. Kinglet listened to all this with open ears and a horrified soul. Was that what they did at Dohnavur ? Then he for one did not want to go.

But Mimosa stood her ground. “Shall I throw my children, for whom I have worked as a coolie, to the river or the well or the desert ? Nay, but I will go to Dohnavur and return.”

At last, having shouted itself hoarse, the company dispersed, and too agitated inwardly to touch food, though she held herself still before them all, Mimosa lay down beside her little boys and tried to sleep. She was oppressed, but not in despair. With the dawn she would rise and go.

But with the dawn one who had never slept arose and stirred the husband to fresh opposition. “I will never let thee go,” he said. The sturdy Mischief spoke his mind in decided tones. He sent a message to Star. “Tell her I am only four and have walked for ten miles, and my feet are sore. I will come another time.” This gave the father his cue. Certainly the Fortunate Fourth would stay with him. As for their first-born, nothing would persuade him to part with him, and he led him off and hid him away in a private room and turned the key in the lock, lest at the last moment he should change his mind again.

And now all was safe. This would bind the mother’s feet, for what mother wold leave her first-born and the Fortunate Fourth ?

And Mimosa, what could she do ?The strange pressure, as if of a hand pressing upon her pushing her forth, had not passed from her; she knew that she must go. But how, without her boys ?

She stood silent as is her wont in all moments of high tension. We who have seen her can see her as she stood speechless, gazing with dark, deep eyes into something not seen of men. What is it that we see when we are not here at all in the body, but out of the body ? The shouting about her sounded faint and far away. She was communing with her Father.

Were these children whom He had given her and for whom strength to toil had been given year after year, were they to be taken fom her one by one and brought up to follow that which she abhorred ? Twice, for a few brief minutes, she had been given to drink from a cup of living water. Were her children to go thirsty all their lives ? She knew there was more to drink than those few drops in the cup, there must be springs and fountains. Oh, the thirst of her years ! Were her children never to drink and be satisfied ?

But how leave two of them to the malice of those who would use the oppurtunity to the full ? What might be shown to them within one week in that wicked heathen town ?

It is not the fashion to speak thus. We whitewash facts now, fearing to offend. But, deep under all, we know, and there are some who do not fear to say it, the blackest pages of our Bible find illustration in every land where the fear of God is not. Sin may be covered with the garlands of jasmine, but it is sin.

This was all open to the mother; but with a valorous faith, faith that could not be refused, Mimosa cast her treasures into the arms of God. She had the assurance that she must go on; but it rent her very heart, and she lifted up her voice and wept.

And as she went along the road, carrying her baby and leading her seven-year-old boy by the hand, she went on weeping, nad her first-born heard her voice and broke from his prison, for this was more than he could bear, and he raced after her. She heard his footsteps and stopped.

“Mother, mother, do not go,” he cried most earnestly. “They will give the drugged medicine powder.” For the talk he had heard had soaked into his soul.

She hardly remembers what she said, only she knows she did not try to persuade him to come. She was past talk now, she only went on. And the boy went with her.

Then, raising her hands to heaven in mute gesture of adoration, with one supreme act of faith she committed her jewel child, the little four-year-old from whom she had never been parted, to the special care of her Father and God, and set her face once more towards the journey to distant Dohnavur.

It was a weary walk for them all. They had left hom after a scanty meal on the previous afternoon; the children had been given food on arrival at their father’s house; but Mimosa had touched nothing either then or before starting. A bandy journey would follow, and then another trudge on the hot roads. It was a silent company that toiled, for they were too fatigued to talk; but they never thought of turning back.

Two evening later, in the unannounced fashion of the East, they arrived at Dohnavur.

[b]Mimosa ?[/b]

I was in the far corner of the compound at the time; a scout flew to tell me. And, as I ran across the playground, detaining little hands caught at my sari, and little dots of blue danced and tumbled round me, but I hardly saw them. I saw only a small, slim figure in its orange and crimson raiment and pretty silver bangles against the green shadows of the mango-trees, saw the brave brown eyes trying to smile through tears, saw the little hands held up in a gesture of farewell. Fled were twenty-two years like twenty-two minutes. Mimosa here !

“Where is she “” I asked the panting child who trotted alongside.

“On Premie Sittie’s verandah.”

A moment later I was there. Facing the door, as I went through it, stood a man, and in that flash of time two currents set from him to me, joy, sorrow; but the sorrow flooded over the joy and ended it. “O Servant of Righteousness (his baptismal name), is it thou ?”

Then the woman who was standing with her back to the door turned quickly, a tired, old, old woman. Mimosa ? Where was Mimosa ? The little girl of the bright raiment and the jewels and the tears, where was she ? But in a moment she was in my arms like a long-lost child found at last. Tears ? There were tears, who could have restrained them ? And through my own I saw her, an old, tired woman, years and years older than I felt myself.

Beside her stood three boys, weary but polite, in her arms was a baby extremely impolite. He created a diversion by wailing a vehement protest, and his mother dashed the tears from her eyes with the gesture so well remembered, and comforted her baby, and peace reigned again, and we all made friends.

Two of the boys were her little sons, one, from that half-way halting place, was a nephew, notorious as a scampish young madcap, who had elected to come, “to see what it was like,” he said.

At first it was as if there was nothing left of that little lost girl but the soft brown eyes, but gradually, as she rested, there appeared slowly, as a face rising slowly through clear water, the dear and familiar in this child of our desires. The character was there, the quick intelligience, the wonderful look of spiritual apprehension that in childhood was impressive in both sisters. But all was masked by age. Star, two years older, looked much younger. Four times we have down with her to the borders of death; doctors have given her up; only our hope held on; she can never be strong, we are told, and she has often suffered; life has not always been kind to her; but, beside this wayworn woman, Star looked as if she had glided down the smooth river of the years in a cushioned barge. But the calm eyes of quiet brown told of victory and peace;: “As dying, and, behold, we live.”

Oh, what will it be when such as she bathe in the pool of immortality ? Will they rise with youth renewed, the pain they wore so long stripped off like an encumbering wrap, the real essential spirit of the life lived here shining forth like a light through clear chrystal ?

What will it be, when they escape from the cramping ways of time and find themselves in the infinite ? For the entrance of the greater world is wide and sure, and they who see the straitness and the painfulness from which they have been delivered must wonder exceedingly as they are received into those large rooms with joy and immortality.

[b]The End Of A Golden Thread[/b]

We had many talks together, and the talks came to be like looks through open windows into a house full of beautiful things.

I do not think that in the East such looks are often given. A shyness slips like a pane of glass between speaker and listener. Then a little breath breathes on the pane, and a fine mist clouds it. Then a curtain is drawn across, and no more is seen. So even a fugitive glance is something to be thankful for.

Thinking over these long looks that were really times of heart listening to heart, it seemed to me that something new had been given, even a very lovely story too good to keep to ourselves.

One evening, as we sat on a fallen block of stone, looking without speaking at the pink flush in the sky over the mountains, the question rose in my mind, How did Mimosa know what she ought to do and ought not to do in the little matters of life where compromise would have been so easy, and a narrow hardness so hindering and hurting to others ?

The festivals, for example, that are part of Indian life, as the pattern woven in the carpet is part of the carpet, so that you can hardly walk on the carpet without treading on the pattern; and the little customs and courtesies that are like the dye in the colours, what of them ? How walk at all without offence ?

“When Kinglet was a baby, my sister-in-law asked me to come with her to the great festival at the temple by the sea, and all my neighbours and relatives went; yes, everyone went, and I went too.

“There was much brightness and a gaiety; but at night tom-toms and strange noises and a feel of something I did not like. I did not go ever again.

And the family ceremonies and feasts ? “I always went if I could. But in the Ritual of the Corner while the women censed the offerings, swaying the censer so,” and her arm swung gently to and fro, “then I watied outside. I waited while they marked Siva’s sign upon their foreheads, and then I went in and joined with them in love.”

And so it was all through. She could not tell me why she had felt some things impossible; it was just that she was not at home in that air, and the sounds were the voices of strangers.

The sun had set by now, the sky was like a great soft rose with a single star shining deep in its heart. I thought of Jenny Lind, of the story told in her Life of how one found her by the sea in the sunset with her Bible open on her knee, and asked her how she came to abandon the stage at the very height of her fame.

“When every day it made me think less of this” — and Jenny Lind touched her Bible — “and nothing at all of that” — and she pointed to the quiet sky — “what else could I do ?”

But Mimosa had no Bible. Would it have been strange if she had missed her way ?

She had the end of the golden thread:

“I give you the end of a golden thread,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you straight to Jerusalem’s gate
Built in the city wall.”

Oh, need we ever fear ? The least strand of that thread is enough to lead the one who holds it fast all the way home.

[b]"Farewell, Little Brothers"[/b]

Only a few days of rest, and the mother knew she must return. She could not rest with us while her little Mischief with his wide-open eyes might be seeing unforgettable things and hearing words no love of hers could wash from memory. Her baby had been taken, protesting indignantly, to our little hospital, and Vadivu had tended his hurts, for the hard life his mother was living had told very sorely on him. We wanted to keep him till he was well; but even those few days had changed him from a fretful, wailing, skinny scrap into something approaching a jolly baby boy. Even his mother’s anxious eyes would light, till they shone like gentle stars, as she listened to the chuckles of this her unlucky, precious Fifth and saw him nod his bandaged little head when we asked him: “Tell us, little God’s gift, tell us, will you come back for the Christmas festival ?”

We had dreaded the good-bye. The boys and thir cousin, who so far had taken the law into his own hands and decidedly intended to stay, were with the others in the playroom when the time came for Mimosa to go. She had seen her own alone before; now she just looked in, all her hungry mother-passion in her eyes; but they did not see it. “Farewell, little brothers,” she said, waving her hand to the whole company, indicating with a delicate, purposeful turn of the phrase that hers were ours and ours were hers, each and all included in that farewell; “Peace be with you, my little brothers.”

And so she left us, loving and simple and very brave.

[b]“Send For Me: I Can Come”[/b]

But she is back again.

For on a good day a letter came from her, saying: “I beseech you to send for me. My coming is possible.” How ? What had happened ? Hardly daring to believe the thing could be, we sent our faithful Pearl, fellow-worker for nearly thirty years.

And she returned with Mimosa and the sturdy four-year-old and ten-months-old baby boy, and a wistful and dear little maiden, the elder brother’s neglected little daughter whom Mimosa had befriended. “I could not leave her. I could not have left a little puppy dog to be lonely and half starved,” she said. But Mimosa looked almost frightened in her wonder and her joy. She looked as if she felt anything might happen any minute to end it. It has taken a whole month to wash that look from her face.

One day her husband came. He did not go near her upon her return, so she felt at last, with a sudden courage, that he did not care for the disgrace of owning a wife whose leanings were now known to the world. And that was why she had felt she might rise up and come. She had tole him now that she would return if he wished it, but not just yet. She must learn, she was learning to read, she could no longer go on without being able to read the Bible. All those years she had felt her way like one blind, groping and stumbling; now her eyes had been opened, she must see clearly, she must know. “When I am established I will return.”

It was the last thing he desired, but he went away, and now her hope is that he will come back and wish to learn himself. For he could not help being impressed by the astonishing happiness of everything he saw. It was the evening hour when he came into the Boys’ Compound. Kinglet was playing football with the other biggish boys. Music and another were careering about on an old tricycle, and Mischief was dashing giddily round as a driver of a team of horses with jingling reins. Later on he had them to himself for a talk. “Do you not wish to come back with me ?” But the boys were silent; they did not want to hurt him, but they did not want to go. Then Music had a happy thought. Why this dilemma ? “Be God’s man and come with us,” he said.

Music had beautiful earnest eyes, like the eyes his mother had when she stood by the mango-tree and tried not to cry. With these eyes looking into his, his father could answer nothing. Perhaps they will draw him to come.

But he left us that day without food ; he would not stain his caste by touching food, and some are praying for another miracle.

Not till yesterday did I hear the end of Mimosa’s journey home. The story dropped by accident among other tellings.

She had left us without money. Not a word had she said, and we did not know. Afterwards a fear shot through us lest it might be so, and we sent a servant after her with enough to take her home. But he loitered by the way, and it did not reach her.

The first part of her journey was easy, for she travelled with one of our family; but after the bullock-cart and train were left behind there was a fifteen-mile walk, and, carrying her baby boy and her little bundle of things, Mimosa became suddenly faint.

She sat down by the road, a desolate figure, alone as no Indian woman cares to be alone on the road, for her brother, paid to escort her to us, had gone home a week before.

“Father,” she said, looking up in the old way, “Father, I am tired. I spent all I had in taking the boys to Dohnavur; I cannot hire a cart. But indeed it is necessary that I should reach my home. Kindly give me strength to walk.”

For a little while she sat there, saying softly, “Father, Father,” and the word comforted her, and she got up and walked, though slowly with pauses to rest, the remaining ten miles.

But she was exhausted when she reached home. She lay down on her mat, with her Fifth beside her, and she longed for a drink of water.

Presently, to her relief, a relative, hearing she had returned, came in, and touched by the sight of her fatigue, she drew water, lighted a fire, and put things in train for the evening meal.

Mimosa lay and watched her from her mat. It was getting dark, and we know how depressing twilight and tiredness together can be. Soon the house was dark save for the light of the poor little fire made of a few small bits of brushwood, gathered before she left home and left in readiness. There was no gleam of polished brass vessels, no brightness anywhere. She missed her little Music. The unfortunate Fifth was tired and cross — poor little lad, it was not his nature to be cross, but he had had a good deal to put up with — and she, his mother, was tireder than he; but deep in her heart she was utterly content.

“If only I could be sure of seeing them even once in the year,” she had said to Star in a moment of almost weakness of resolve; but she had rallied at once. She knew it would not be easy to come even only once a year; but they would be happy and learning to be good. What did anything else matter ?

Now she lay and thought of them, pictured their every action, following them through thier day with loving, loving eyes and then, with that final act of committal which had brought peace to her so often before, she looked up through the dull air of the dull little house. “To You, Father.” The word has a gesture of its own; it is the gesture of a little child who has learned to give up something it would have liked to keep.

The Fortunate Fourth was retrieved. That very decided young man had made up his mind to rejoin his mother, which settled matters so far as he was concerned.

Then, as the days wore on and her husband took no notice whatever of her, she said she had begun to wonder if he really had, for the present, at any rate, tired of the disgrace of such a peculiar wife. And at last, like the glorious silver shining of the dawn star in these skies of great stars, a thought rose slowly as in some far, dim horizon of the mind, and it rose and rose and swam upwards till it became familiar, beautiful, a star of hope indeed. She would go to Dohnavur. She would learn to read, that the Book of God might open to her. She would receive the spiritual washing. After that God would show. Yes, she would rise and go. “And so I have come,” she said as she ended her story.

[b]Love Will Find A Way[/b]

But it is only the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another, and this, the last that may be written now, centres round a certain glorious Sunday evening when, with the western sky aflame, we streamed forth to the side of the Red Lake under the mountains, the lake shown in the Lotus Buds, in the picture called “God’s Fire.”

There, as we stood in a long curved line on the long curved bank, scores of little children scattered among grown-up people and boys and girls, Mimosa, while her husband stood looking on in bemused quiesence, walked solemnly into the water to receive her baptism.

To some who had lately joined us it was just that ever-joyful thing, a Christian baptism, but to us who saw her standing, as it were, at the end of a long avenue of years, to the invisible angels and to their Lord and hers, how much more — oh, how much more it was than pen can write or tongue tell !

And now she is back in her bigoted Hindu world, and she writes that some wonder, some scoff, and some are listening a little. Her husband, whom she has set her heart on winning, feels her a disgrace, but the amazing thing is that he owns as his wife one who has so shamed his caste, which is not one of the more tolerant which allow a woman to remain within the fold even after baptism. Her life cannot be easy. But then, she has not asked for ease; she has asked for the shield of patience that she may overcome.

So we do not fear at all to leave Mimosa’s story here, with the first happy ending, that promises another happier, most happy for ever. And this first chapter of a book that is still being written goes forth with a great joy and with two earnest intentions — to comfort, if it may be, some who, depressed by the perplexities of these days, are almost tempted to think our Lord is not in His world now as He was in olden time, and to win help for those who need it.

Will the first be in any wise fulfilled ? Can one consider this solitary Indian woman protected, comforted, sustained, fed with bread the world knew not of, given to drink of fountains in the desert, without feeling that the love of God has many ways of working, and may be working now unseen through all the clamour and the sadness of a foolish generation ? Is not such a story a witness to the Invisible ?

Are there those for whom we have prayed for long, who seem beyond our reach now ? Love will find a way. Are we discouraged because we do not see our signs, and the solid rocks seem to be sinking under shifting sands ? It is not so. Love is mighty and must prevail. Terrible in judgments, marvellous in loving-kindness, Love will find a way.

Out in these corners of the earth those who are face to face with the old elemental forces of sin know what it is to shiver at times with a sense of the almost omnipotence of the god of this world. Is there not comfort for us in this story ? In and out of the deep, dark places of heathendom — yes, and as truly among the garish lights of a Christendom that has lost its first warm love — whereever there is the least, the faintest response to Love, there love will follow and find, for nothing in heaven or earth or under the earth is impossible to Love.

And will not my second intention find fulfillment somewhere ? Will not prayer that can be as a shield in battle, as dew in heat, as a cool wind on a breathless day, as the light of the moon and stars at night, be round about any anywhere who, enchanted by a glimpse of the loveliness of Christ, are following Him to-day — dear unknown fellow-lovers ? For God has other Mimosas