ht that
in the case of one of them was later on destined to find itself in good
ground, and to spring up and bear goodly fruit.

CHAPTER XXXII.

A BOY NO LONGER.

Frank and Bert put their hearts into the city mission work, just as they
did into everything else that they undertook, and it was well they did.
For surely nothing save genuine zeal, and fidelity to a strong purpose
could have carried them through the experiences that awaited them. The
mission school was still small and struggling. But for the almost heroic
energies of its superintendent, a clerk in a city banking house, it
could not have been carried on at all. He was a small, slight,
fragile-looking man, but he had a heart big enough for a giant, and
having consecrated his spare hours to this most unattractive of all
phases of Christian work, he carried it on with a self-denying
earnestness that no difficulties could dampen, nor obstacles appal. He
was as ready with his purse, to the extent of its slender ability, as he
was with his Bible, and his splendid unselfishness was so well
appreciated by the dangerous degraded beings among whom he toiled, that
alone and unprotected he might go among them at any hour of the day or
night, and meet with nothing but respect and rude courtesy.

Such a man was David McMaster, under whose direction Bert and Frank lost
no time in placing themselves; and a right glad welcome they had from
him, his pale, thin face fairly glowing with pleasure at the addition to
his force of two such promising recruits. With him they went the rounds
of squalid tenements, hideous back alleys, and repulsive shanties, the
tattered children gazing at them with faces in which curiosity was
mingled with aversion, and their frousy parents giving them looks of
enmity and mistrust, no doubt because they were so clean and well
dressed.

But apparently noting nothing of this, Mr. McMaster led the way from one
rookery to another, introducing his new workers to their wretched
inhabitants with an easy grace that disarmed all suspicion, and made
them feel that so long as he was the presiding genius of the school,
they had nothing to fear in the worst locality.

The following Sunday morning they began work on their own account. The
school was held at ten o'clock, closing just in time to permit the
teachers to get to church, and the part assigned to Bert and Frank was
to go out into the highways and byways, and invite the children playing
in th