the precinct: "They have no other
place to play; better pray for sense to help them get one." I saw him the
other day--the preacher--singing to the children in the tenement street
and giving them flowers; and I knew that the day of sense and of charity
had swept him with it.

The present is swallowed up again, and there rises before me the wraith of
a village church in the far-off mountains of Pennsylvania. It is Sunday
morning at midsummer. In the pulpit a young clergyman is preaching from
the text: "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even the
least, ye did it unto me." The sun peeps through the windows, where
climbing roses nod. In the tall maples a dove is cooing; the drowsy hum of
the honey-bee is on the air. But he recks not of these, nor of the
peaceful day. His soul has seen a vision of hot and stony streets, of
squalid homes, of hard-visaged, unlovely childhood, of mankind made in His
image twisted by want and ignorance into monstrous deformity: and the
message he speaks goes straight to the heart of the plain farmers on the
benches; His brethren these, and steeped in the slum! They gather round
him after the service, their hearts burning within them.

I see him speeding the next day toward the great city, a messenger of love
and pity and help. I see him return before the week's end, nine starved
urchins clinging to his hands and the skirts of his coat, the first Fresh
Air party that went out of New York twoscore years ago. I see the
big-hearted farmers take them into their homes and hearts. I see the sun
and the summer wind put back color in the wan cheek, and life in the
shrunken and starved frame. I hear the message of one of the little ones
to her chums left behind in the tenement: "I can have two pieces of pie to
eat, and nobody says nothing if I take three pieces of cake"; and I know
what it means to them. Laugh? Yes! laugh and be glad. The world has sorrow
enough. Let in the sunshine where you can, and know that it means life to
these, life now and a glimpse of the hereafter. I can hear it yet, the
sigh of the tired mother under the trees on Twin Island, our Henry-street
children's summer home: "If heaven is like this, I don't care how soon I
go."

For the sermon had wings; and whithersoever it went blessings sprang in
its track. Love and justice grew; men read the brotherhood into the
sunlight and the fields and the woods, and the brotherhood became real. I
see the minister, no longe