The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1930, Page 27

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER. 27

Now’s the Day, and Now’s the Hour.

One evening I was sitting on the door-step of
a mud cottage, visiting my old Hindu friend and
neighbor Karloo near Trivandrum in South India.
The brown house, with its thatch of dried coconut
leaves and its smooth, hard threshing-floor in a neat
square before the door, was built in the center of
a tapioca-field on the hillside, sloping down to the
rice-field below.

Squatting on the ground near me, Karloo was
preparing the vegetables that were to make curry for
her next meal. She was like thousands of other
Indian women, grown old while yet young in years.
Her gaunt figure and brown, flabby skin over thin
muscles in her arms showed from under the muslin
cloth thrown over her shoulders. Deep-set, intel-
ligent and hard furrows marked her face.
Life’s sorrow had stamped its imprint there.

Suddenly, as the setting sun lit her face, there
was something about Karloo that reminded me of
my mother. ‘The differences were many, of course.
I need not describe my mother to you,— you all
have known gray-haired ladies past seventy. It was
the furrows that made me think of my mother as
I gazed at Karloo. Grief spares none of us, no mat-
ter of what creed or race or social standing we are.
But the marks of sorrow in my mother’s face are
softened. And there is hope in her eyes, undying
hope. “What if we have our troubles here, there is
rest and joy coming,” I can read in my mother’s
face. But the lines in Karloo’s face marked it with
hopelessness, and there was puotning but cold despair
in her eyes.

We were having a neighborly chat. With the
eagerness of an intelligent mind she was asking
about the customs and lives of her white friends.
“And what makes you leave your homes and come
to this far-away country of ours and live with us?”
she asked. I tried to tell her in my blundering way
of our hope of a life eternal through our Savior
Jesus and that we had come to share our good news
with them. “Don’t you want to learn more of the
things we have come to teach?” I asked.

Karloo had finished her work. As I spoke, she
paused. For a moment she gazed out over the rice-
field, now waving like an emerald sea in the evening
breeze. She seemed to be trying to grasp something
like hope. But that was only fora moment. Then
she stooped and Picred up her knife and vegetables.
“Well,” she said, “you can tell my children and
grandchildren about ‘the good news you have. Their

eyes

heads are young and can Jearn something new. For
me you are too late.”

Karloo disappeared into the house, and I walked
home with bowed head.

There are millions of Karloos in India. For most
of them we are too late. But for the millions of
daughters and granddaughters we still have time.
And what is more, we are living in an unusually
favorable time for reaching for them.

India is changing. She is awaking from her
sleep of centuries. Dr. E. Stanley Jones, who has

Village Women at Work in India.

spent almost twenty years there, traveling through
the length and breadth of the land, says that India
is changing at the rate of ten years of progress to
every year of the calendar.

Every periodical coming from there brings fresh
evidence of the change now going on. Last week
we read of the report a committee, made up mostly
of Indians and appointed by the government, that
has probed into the question of marriage in all parts
of India. This committee will recommend that laws
be made to make it punishable for parents to marry
their daughters at less than fourteen years. This
is a step in the direction of doing away with child-
marriage, one of the most glaring wrongs done to