Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/102

82 his flowing robe. They gravely bowed and salaamed as we entered. The missionary, glancing his eye along the array of girls, gave a signal to the first, who repeated in a strong, clear voice a text from the Tamil Daily Food. The second and the third followed, and so on down the line to the little creatures four or five years old, who could only lisp out a fragment of the daily text.

It was a pleasant sight to see these poor girls, children of idolaters, forbidden by their sex, according to Hindu law and custom, all the advantages of education, thus gathered by the hand of Christian love to be refined in mind and heart, and taught the way of life. Though they rarely remain after eleven or twelve years of age, and may at any moment be taken away by the jealousy of heathen parents, yet before that time they may receive impressions for good that even the corrupting and deadening influences of Hindu social life will not obliterate. If the influence be not apparent in this generation, it may be in the next, when these girls have become wives and mothers.

The girls of this school, though of good caste, are from the poorer classes of society; for those