[Illustration:  GIRLS OF ALL CASTES MEET ON COMMON GROUND IN THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE.]

Eminent among the student body for maturity of thought and depth of Christian purpose is Shelomith Vincent.  Many of these characteristics may be accounted for by her splendid inheritance.  Her father was of the military caste, the son of a Zemindar, or petty rajah.  At the time of the Mutiny he, a boy of ten years, ran away in the crowd and followed the mutineers on their long march from Lucknow to Agra, where he was rescued by a missionary and brought up in his family.  Later, longing to know his past, the young man returned to Lucknow, found his relatives, weighed in the balance the claims of Hinduism and Christianity, and of his own accord decided for the latter.  Later we see him a Sanskrit student in Benares, where he married his wife, a fifteen-year-old Brahman convert.

The Christian couple moved soon to the Central Provinces, where Mr. Vincent entered upon his twenty-five years of service as a Christian pastor, using his Sanskrit learning to interpret the message of Christianity to his Hindu friends.  Yet it was in lowlier ways that his life was most telling.  Settling in a peasant colony of a thousand so-called converts, only half-Christianized, the story of his labors and triumphs reads like that of Columba, or Boniface in early Europe.  Through perils of robbers and perils of famine he labored on, building villages, digging wells, distributing American corn in famine days, reproving, teaching, guiding.  All this I am telling, because it explains much of the daughter’s quiet strength.  One of ten children, she has spent many years in earning money to educate the younger brothers and sisters, and she is finishing her college course as a mature woman.  Miss Vincent hopes that the American fellowship may one day be hers; and already her plans are developing as to the ways she will contrive to pass on her opportunities to her fellow countrywomen.  Her heart is with those illiterate village women among whom her childhood was passed; her longing is to share with them the truth, the beauty, and the goodness with which Lal Bagh has filled her days.

Has Lal Bagh been a paying investment?  One wishes that every one whose dollars have found expression in its walls might come to feel the indefinable spirit that pervades them, filling cold brick and mortar with life energy.  For centuries philosophers searched for that Philosopher’s Stone that was to transmute base metals into gold.  In the world to-day there are those who have found a subtler magic that transforms dead gold and silver into warm human purposes and the Christ-spirit of service.  That is the miracle one sees in daily process at Lal Bagh.

IN THE SECRET OF HIS PRESENCE

ELLEN LAKSHMI GOREH (Lucknow College)

     In the secret of His presence how my soul delights to hide! 
     Oh, how precious are the lessons which I learn at Jesus’ side! 
     Earthly cares can never vex me, neither trials lay me low;
     For when Satan comes to tempt me, to the secret place I go.