"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: