ell it to me himself,
for it seemed almost too strange to be true. "I lifted her to my
shoulder"--and one realizes the pretty scene it must have made for the
little girl to go through the crowd of people, drying her tears and
riding proudly on the shoulders of the kindly, tall, dark man! "I said
to her that I would take her in, and I did so, and I said to her that we
should some day have a room big enough for all who should come. And when
she went home she told her parents--I only learned this afterward--that
she was going to save money to help build the larger church and
Sunday-school that Dr. Conwell wanted! Her parents pleasantly humored
her in the idea and let her run errands and do little tasks to earn
pennies, and she began dropping the pennies into her bank."

"She was a lovable little thing--but in only a few weeks after that she
was taken suddenly ill and died; and at the funeral her father told
me, quietly, of how his little girl had been saving money for a
building-fund. And there, at the funeral, he handed me what she had
saved--just fifty-seven cents in pennies."

Dr. Conwell does not say how deeply he was moved; he is, after all, a
man of very few words as to his own emotions. But a deep tenderness had
crept into his voice.

"At a meeting of the church trustees I told of this gift of fifty-seven
cents--the first gift toward the proposed building-fund of the new
church that was some time to exist. For until then the matter had barely
been spoken of, as a new church building had been simply a possibility
for the future.

"The trustees seemed much impressed, and it turned out that they were
far more impressed than I could possibly have hoped, for in a few days
one of them came to me and said that he thought it would be an excellent
idea to buy a lot on Broad Street--the very lot on which the building
now stands." It was characteristic of Dr. Conwell that he did not point
out, what every one who knows him would understand, that it was his
own inspiration put into the trustees which resulted in this quick and
definite move on the part of one of them. "I talked the matter over with
the owner of the property, and told him of the beginning of the fund,
the story of the little girl. The man was not one of our church, nor in
fact, was he a church-goer at all, but he listened attentively to the
tale of the fifty-seven cents and simply said he was quite ready to
go ahead and sell us that piece of land for ten thou