The schoolroom is so primitive that you would hardly recognize it as such. Light and air and space are all too little. There are no desks or even benches. A small, wooden blackboard and the teacher's table and rickety chair are all that it can boast in the way of equipment. The only interesting thing in sight is the children themselves, rows of them on the floor, writing letters in the sand. Unwashed they are, uncombed and almost unclothed, but with all the witchery of childhood in their eyes. In that bare room lies the possibility of transforming the life of the Village of the Seven Palms. But the teacher is innocent of the ways of modern pedagogy, and deep and complicated are the snares of the Tamil alphabet with its two hundred and sixteen elusive characters. Baffling, too, are the mysteries of number combination. "If six mangoes cost three annas, how much will one mango cost?" Arul never had an anna of her own, how should she know? The teachers bamboo falls on her hard, little hand, and two hot tears run down and drop on the cracked slate. The way to learning is long and beset with as many thorns as the crooked path through the prickly pear cactus. Bible stories are happier. Arul can tell you how the Shepherds sang and all about the little boy who gave his own rice cakes and dried fish, to help Jesus feed hungry people. She has been hungry so often that that story seems real. The years pass over Arul's head, leaving her a little taller, a little fleeter of foot as she hurries back from the pasture, a little wiser in the ways of God and men. Still her father holds out against the inducements of child labor. Arul shall go to school as long as there is anything left for her to learn. And into Arul's eyes there has come the gleam of a great ambition. She will leave the Village of the Seven Palms and go into the wide world. The most spacious existence she knows of is represented by the Girls' Boarding School in the town twenty miles away. To enter that school, to study, to become a teacher perhaps--but beyond that the wings of Arul's imagination have not yet learned to soar. The meaning of service for Christ and India, the opportunity of educated womanhood, such ideas have not yet entered Arul's vocabulary. She will learn them in the days to come. Countless villages of the Seven Palms; countless schools badly equipped and poorly taught; countless Aruls--feeling within them dim gropings, half-formed ambitions. Somewhere in America there are girls trained in rural education and longing for the chance for research and original work in a big, untried field. What a chance for getting together the girl and the task! [Illustration: THE SORT OF HOME THAT ARUL KNEW IN THE VILLAGE OF SEVEN PALMS] A HIGH SCHOOL Where the Girls Come from.