For a minute or two we pause and watch the children, who seem to swarm everywhere. Some are playing at the nasty drain; no wonder these little ones droop and die, for there is no friendly policeman to warn them that this is a death trap! Where do they all come from? Does no one look after them? For they are everywhere, in the road, on doorsteps, in the shops, round the booths in the market-place, under the shadow of the Roman Catholic Cathedral; scores of them, playing, sleeping, picking up scraps and eating them, uncared for, and untaught. See! Who is this coming down the cobbly street, with a big, fat baby on his back? Only an Indian boy, and not very much bigger than his baby mistress. What a sad face he has; it does not attract us, for there is a shade of bitterness about the mouth. His is a hard life--driven to and fro by the whim of the baby’s mother; no thanks and no pay; only beatings if he does not please her. An Indian slave! You look surprised! But this is quite a common thing in Peru and other parts of this continent. “Only an Indian slave! A prey to his mistress’s whim, Beaten, battered, and starved, What does she care for him? ‘A soul, did you say, he possessed?’ She laughs: ‘Why, he’s worse than a dog! I purchased him, body and soul, To scold, and to starve, and to flog.’ Only an Indian slave! He may be in their esteem, But his soul, with the price of blood, Christ Jesus came down to redeem.” May the children of God go forth to proclaim The loosening power of His wonderful Name. [Illustration: INDIAN SLAVE AND HIS BABY MISTRESS] In her fascinating book on “Peru,” Miss Geraldine Guinness says: “In Arequipa there are three thousand of these little Indian slaves, four-fifths of whom are cruelly treated, while the good treatment of the remaining one-fifth, with rare exceptions, consists in the fact of their not being brutally beaten, and not suffering much hunger. “I have heard the screams of child-servants not more than seven years old, who were daily beaten by a bad-tempered mistress. I have seen children ill and dying, for whom no one cared. I know a little girl of seven, who, a few months ago, saw her mother’s dead body taken away to the cemetery. Since that day she has minded the shop all alone, and kept house for her father, who only comes home at nights, and who is often away for weeks at a time.” Some years ago, when the maize crop failed, and there was a terrible famine in the land, starvation stared the Indian mothers in the face. What were they to do under such circumstances? They could not feed their little ones, so the children were brought to the cities in thousands, and sold for a few shillings or given away, to save the mothers and other little ones in the mountain huts from starvation and death. To-day it is not an uncommon thing to be accosted in the street by an Indian woman, and to be asked to purchase her little girl or boy for a few coins.