Children -- India; India -- Social life and customs
Men and women have gone to India to tell of the King of the world, and
because of that new things are coming into the lives of the children
there. There is great excitement when a European is seen for the first
time in an Indian village. One day the boys of Holapura heard that an
English lady had entered the house of the headman of the place. They
left their games and hurried to the hut, but ere they got there, it
was crowded to the door, so they climbed on the roof and looked down
through the holes in the thatch. As they looked in they saw the crowded
room and the white lady. A woman was bringing out a blanket from a
dark inner room, and was spreading it on a mound of earth, which did
for a seat, and now the white lady sat down and the boys gazed and
listened. They saw a streamlet of water trickling across the mud floor
at her feet; they saw the little room packed with women and boys and
babies, and in amongst them they saw the household cow, the goats,
and some chickens; but these things did not astonish the boys at all;
they had often seen a crowded hut before, and even when Ruthamma, an
Indian Christian teacher who was with the white missionary, began to
speak, they scarcely listened, for all their attention was fixed on
the stranger. But they began to listen a little when she sang “What a
friend we have in Jesus” in their own language. Before many lines had
been sung a goat made up its mind to go out, and there was so much
bustle amongst the children about his going that Ruthamma had to stop
and begin her hymn over again. The boys listened eagerly, till suddenly
they heard a swoop and a whiz through the air. They shrank back, for
vultures are not nice birds, and this one was coming very near. It
shot past them through the hole in the thatch into the room. A dead
fowl hung from the roof. The bird clutched it and flew away again. The
fowl was gone; everyone rushed out and shouted to make the vulture drop
it. But the bird would not, and when it had flown far far away from the
village, the little group gathered again. But this had spent much time,
and Ruth hurried on in spite of a lively quarrel between two wee boys,
who, when their grandmother tried to catch them, vanished underneath
the cow, to sit and make faces at each other there, and be quite ready
to begin to fight again when the missionaries had gone.
That is how some children first hear of the King of India. But of
course they understand little of what they hear for a long time.
Sometimes the children catch up the tunes and the words of the new
songs, so unlike their old ones, and remember them. In a town far from
this village, a missionary was riding along the street one day, when he
heard a sound that seemed familiar. He checked his horse and looked and
listened. No one in the side street noticed him. There he saw a little
Hindu boy with Hindu men and women around him. He was singing away
heartily in Telugu:--
“Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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