plied Dr. Chrystal,
fervently. "But there are many things to be considered, and God alone
knows how it will be with me a few months hence. I am altogether in His
hands."

"Well, God knows right well that we couldn't have a better minister than
you, sir, and so there's no fear but He'll send you back to us all
right," returned Bert, his eager loyalty to his pastor quite carrying
him away.

Dr. Chrystal smiled sympathetically at the boy's enthusiasm.

"There are just as good fish in the sea as have ever yet been caught,
Bert," he answered.

"I thoroughly appreciate your kind, and I know sincere, compliment, but
it was not to talk about myself that I joined you, but about yourself. I
have been thinking that it is full time you took up some definite work
for your Heavenly Master. Don't you think so, too?"

"Yes, I do, sir; and so does Frank, and we're both quite willing to make
a beginning, but we don't just know what to go at."

"I have been thinking about that, too, Bert, and I have an idea I want
to discuss with you. You know the streets that lie between the north and
south portions of our city, and how densely they are packed with people,
very few of whom make any pretensions to religion at all. Now, would it
not be possible for you and Frank to do a little city missionary work in
those streets. The field is white unto the harvest, but the labourers
are so few that it is sad to see how little is being done. What do you
think about it?"

Bert did not answer at once. He knew well the locality Dr. Chrystal had
in mind, and the class of people that inhabited it. For square after
square, tenement houses, tall, grimy, and repulsive, alternated with
groggeries, flaunting, flashy, and reeking with iniquity. The residents
were of the lowest and poorest order. Filth, vice, and poverty, held
high carnival the whole year round. In the day time crowds of tattered
roughs played rudely with one another in the streets, and after dark,
drunken soldiers, sailors, and wharf men, made night hideous with their
degraded revelry or frenzied fighting.

And yet these people had souls to save, and even though they might seem
sunken in sin beyond all hope of recovery, they had children that might
be trained to better ways and a brighter future. It was these children
that Dr. Chrystal had in mind when he spoke to Bert. A union mission
school had lately been established in the very heart of this
unattractive district, and it was sorely in