CHAPTER XXI.

ONLY ONE LAMB.

THERE is a beautiful story, with which many are familiar, of a good missionary who, when too aged to go on with the work which he loved, was found meekly teaching the alphabet to a little child, thankful that he had still power to perform this humble labour for God. Harold was reminded of this anecdote by the position in which he found himself in relation to poor little Shelah.

The child, desolate and helpless in a land of strangers, where the name of Christian was scarcely known, had no one to whom to look for kindness and protection but Harold. He had regarded her as unlovely and unloveable; Shelah, in her merrier days, had excited no sympathy in his mind; but Christian pity now touched a chord, and that chord wakened something like music in young Hartley's desolate spirit. As he marched on painfully in the heat, keeping as near as he could to the camel on which poor Shelah was perched, Harold thought much of the future fate of the young Irish girl. She was of good family, her father a distinguished officer in the army, and Shelah was his only child. When the news of her having been carried off by Arabs should reach India, efforts, and strenuous ones, would doubtless be made for her deliverance. But Arabia was a large country in which to search, without newspapers for advertisements, or postal system for letters, or wires to flash messages with lightning speed.

"Were I to be separated from Shelah, which is likely enough," thought Harold, "or were anything to happen to me, all trace of the child might be utterly lost. Shelah would be buried in some Mahomedan zenana, and childish and thoughtless as she is, would probably soon forget everything about her family and her language. I doubt whether the poor girl would remember her own name for a month. I wish that I had some means of stamping it—either on her form or her memory."

Harold glanced up at the little girl, who still wore her cardinal's hat, though its colour had almost entirely faded. The motion of the camel made Shelah appear as if being rocked on waves; she was clinging to the large bundles strapped on the camel, in order to feel the motion less. Harold raised his voice that it might reach the child.

"What is your name?" he asked, to see how far she was able to identify herself with the daughter of Sir Patrick O'More.

"Lammikin," cried Shelah, looking down from her perch.

"Tell me your other name," said Harold.

"I don't want another name; I'm just Lammikin; that is what Robin used to call me."

"This will never do," thought Harold. Again he raised his voice:

"Do you know the name of your father?"

"Papa," was the ready reply, and Harold could draw no other.

"Do you know, my child, where he lives?"

"In some island; but I don't like islands—they are nothing but sand."

"And like sand is your memory," thought Harold, realising how short a time it would take to obliterate almost everything from a mind such as Shelah O'More's. The young man compassionated the misery to be endured, perhaps for many long years, by loving parents making a wearisome, never-ending, useless search in these wild regions after an only child, hope growing fainter and fainter, and at last dying away in despair.

A thought occurred to the missionary's mind.

"Shelah, you love singing," he said; "shall I make a little song for you to sing as you travel along?"

"It's hard to sing with the big beast bumping me up and down like this," replied Shelah. "But I do like songs, most of all if they're funny."

Harold, to an easy, popular air, which he had often heard the child humming, gave the following jingling rhyme. How strange it was to find himself singing:

"Shelah O'More; I'm Shelah O'More; Take me to India's bright, beautiful shore."

The little device had instant success. Shelah for a few moments loosened her clinging hands in order to clap them.

"I like that song!" she exclaimed, and instantly began to sing it. Then she paused to ask a question.

"Shall I find the good woman and Robin on India's bright, beautiful shore?" said the child.

"No," replied Harold, with a quivering lip; "they have gone to heaven's shore, which is more bright and beautiful by far."

"Then I'll change the song!" cried Shelah, and she instantly sang out:

"Take me to heaven's bright, beautiful shore."

Harold took the hint unconsciously given. He who had hoped to gather in a Christian flock from amongst the heathen, had here his charge confined to that of one child, a single lamb to feed for the Master.

"I want you to try something besides singing, poor Lammikin," he said. "I want to teach you a little prayer to be said night and morning. It will, I hope, help you to reach the beautiful place."

Shelah again loosened her grasp, and clasped her little sunburnt hands together.

"Say—'Please, Lord, make Shelah a good child, for Christ's sake,'" said Harold, choosing the simplest petition which rose to his mind.

"I know a better prayer than that," said Shelah.

"'O God, teach me to love Thee, for the sake of the Lord Jesus.'

"The kind lady taught me to say that, and Robin gave me a verse:

"'God is love.'"

"Keep those two precious remembrances of them!" exclaimed Harold, his dry, heated eyes relieved by unwonted moisture. "Sing them daily, say them again and again, till we all meet on the beautiful shore."

Harold himself was no longer utterly wretched. That calm spirit of submission had come over his mind, which has been compared to the bending down of the ripe, golden corn, the sign that the harvest time is near.

So onward proceeded Hartley with the Arab banditti towards Djauf; whilst Robin, with the Persians, was from another quarter impatiently pressing on in the same direction. But the little delay which had been occasioned by Hassan's flight on Firdosi had prevented the two movements from coinciding in point of time. In the city of Djauf the two young Knights of St. John were never to meet.