The Hartley Brothers by Charlotte Maria Tucker

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.