Now you are asking me what a cable car is. Oh, dear! I don't understand how to tell you; and I will own it. I have questioned until it is pretty clear to me, but as I said, I don't know how to tell it. You see, the one who explained it to me, seated me in a chair at one side, and said: "You are the engine." This astonishing statement held me quiet, while he put into my hand a tiny cord which he said was a very strong and heavy band. Being bound to believe him, I watched the band placed around a great wheel, on the street in front of me. Away down the street, about two miles, was another wheel, and a rope which had neither beginning nor end was placed around both wheels; at least that was what "he" said. To be sure, it looked to me like the study table, and an inkstand, and a tin can with some twine around them. But since I was an engine, why could not they be two great wheels connected by a rope? "Now," said the speaker, "you—being the engine, you understand—are set in motion, and the band about you being connected with this great wheel, when the band moves, the great wheels do the same, and the iron rope responds, and moves round and round. Now here comes along a car" (it wasn't, it was a spool of thread; never mind!) "here comes along a car drawn by horses; but this a steep ascent" (it was as level as the floor), "and they want to use engine power, so they take off the horses, and a little contrivance underneath grasps the chain, and away goes the car. Understand?"
Yes, I understand, after a fashion. The question is, Do you? Well, we went down town on the cable car.
Arrived at the city, we went with speed to a music store, made our way up stairs to the "parlors." We were late; every chair taken; very little standing room left. We found some, however, to stand in, and were glad even for this opportunity of hearing the sweet-voiced speaker. Who who she? Her name is Layah Barrakat.
A strange-sounding name? Oh, yes, she is a foreigner. Her birthplace is away among the mountains of Lebanon. Once she was a little heathen girl; and the strange sad things she told would have made the tears come to your eyes. If ever you hear or read that Layah Barrakat is to speak on Foreign Missions in any building near where you live, I want you to be sure to hear her.
Let me tell you the story of a pair of red shoes. Our missionaries had a Sabbath-school near where Layah lived; but she had been taught that it was a very wicked place, and she must have nothing to do with it.
One day a lady from the Mission met Layah and invited her to Sabbath-school, telling her she would make her a present of a pair of new shoes if she would come. Layah wanted the shoes; she told her mother about it and begged to go, just once, to get the shoes, promising she would not listen to, or remember a word that was said; so the mother agreed, and she went. But there she heard such wonderful things she could not help listening, and remembering; for the first time she heard about Jesus; how he loved her very much, and had a beautiful home waiting for her, and would show her the way to it if she would follow him. In all her life Layah had never heard of anything like this. She wanted to follow the kind friend who loved her. She received her shoes, beautiful red ones, and she thought a good deal of them, but when Sunday came again she wanted to go back to the school, and hear more about Jesus. She did not dare tell her mother of her wish, for she knew punishment would follow; but at last her desire to go grew so strong that she ran away. Her brother found out where she was, and came for her, scolding and whipping her all the way home.
But all the scolding could not take from her what she had learned. It is a long story, the trials she went through, and the punishments she received for wanting to be a Christian. She used to be cruelly whipped, and shut up in a dark cellar without anything to eat. But it was all to no purpose; she had heard enough of Jesus to make her hungry for him. Nothing else would satisfy her; she was determined to follow him, cost what it might.
By and by, good Doctor Nassau, a missionary, became interested in her; he wrote to some friends in America, telling her story, and a Sabbath-school in West Philadelphia determined to adopt and educate her. So they gathered their pennies, and sent them out, and Layah went to the mission school; but she had to run away from home in order to do so.
The story of her life since then reads almost like a fairy tale; one can hardly imagine it possible that all the strange experiences of which she tells, could have come to her. How she grew up, and married, and went to Egypt as a missionary; how her brother, the very one who used to whip her through the streets, became a Christian, and a teacher in the Mission; how her mother, soon after, learned to love Jesus; how Layah saved many little girls in Egypt; how when the troubles came there, she escaped with her husband and child, after suffering dreadful things, and came to this country, and went wandering through the streets of Philadelphia, in search of one man whom she had met in Egypt—Dr. Dulles Chestnuts—this was his name, as she remembered it.
How the children of the streets chased them, calling them gypsies, how the very dogs barked at them, how she sat down at last on a doorstep, and cried to think that she had come to Christian America, and could find no friend; all these things are deeply interesting. I wish you could have heard her tell them.