y if she could have
known the long wandering journey that was before those letters before
they would finally reach him; she might have been discouraged from
writing them.

Little Mrs. Beck was suddenly sent for one Sunday morning to attend her
sister who was very ill, and she hastily called Ruth over the telephone
and begged her to take her place at the Sunday school. Ruth promised to
secure some one to teach the lesson, but found to her dismay that no one
was willing to go at such short notice. And so, with trembling heart she
knelt for a hasty petition that God would guide her and show her how to
lead these simple people in the worship of the day.

As she stood before them trying to make plain in the broken, mixed
Italian and English, the story of the blind man, which was the lesson for
the day, there came over her a sense of her great responsibility. She
knew that these people trusted her and that what she told them they would
believe, and her heart lifted itself in a sharp cry for help, for light,
to give to them. She felt an appalling lack of knowledge and experience
herself. Where had she been all these young years of her life, and what
had she been doing that she had not learned the way of life so that she
might put it before them?

Before her sat a woman bowed with years, her face seamed with sorrow and
hard work, and grimed with lack of care, a woman whose husband frequently
beat her for attending Sunday school. There were four men on the back
seat, hard workers, listening with eager eyes, assenting vigorously when
she spoke of the sorrow on the earth. They, too, had seen trouble. They
sat there patient, sad-eyed, wistful; what could she show them out of the
Book of God to bring a light of joy to their faces? There were little
children whose future looked so full of hard knocks and toil that it
seemed a wonder they were willing to grow up knowing what was before
them. The money that had smoothed her way thus far through life was not
for them. The comfortable home and food and raiment and light and luxury
that had made her life so full of ease were almost unknown to them. Had
she anything better to offer them than mere earthly comforts which
probably could never be theirs, no matter how hard they might strive?
But, after all, money and ease could in no way soothe the pain of the
heart, and she had come close enough already to these people to know they
had each one his own heart's pain and sorrow to bear. There