and devotion in China,
should be recorded. His quiet life here as an engineer was not less
remarkable, though of a different kind, than life in China had been.
Here, however, he spent the energies of his spare time, to the services
of the poor. At this juncture I was privileged to come in contact with
this remarkable man, in the great city of Manchester, where for a few
months, he was employed on some Governmental Commission. Like his Master
Christ--he went about doing good. My position at this time was an agent,
or scripture reader for "The Manchester City Mission." Gordon found his
way to the office and saw the chairman of the mission, and from him got
permission to accompany one of the missioners round his district. He
expressed his desire to go round one of the poorest districts of the
city; as it might afford him an opportunity of seeing for himself some of
the social blots and scars in our national life; also of giving some
practical help to the deserving poor. My district was such an one as
would furnish him with the opportunities to satisfy him in that
particular, and I was therefore asked to allow Col. Gordon to accompany
me to its squalid scenes, to my Ragged School, cottage and open-air
services, and to the sick and suffering, of which I had many on my list.
This request was gladly complied with; for the first sight of the
stranger made me love and trust him.

And now the hero of so many battles fought for freedom and liberty, was
to witness scenes of warfare of a very different kind. War, it is true,
but not where there are garments rolled in blood and victims slain; but
war with the powers of darkness, war between good and evil, truth and
error, light and darkness. We went together into the lowest slums of the
district; walked arm in arm over the ground where misery tells its sad
and awful tale, where poverty shelters its shivering frame, and where
blasphemy howls its curse. We found out haunts of vice and sin, terrible
in their character, and distressing in their consequences. I found he
had not hitherto been accustomed to this kind of mission. Once on my
entering a den of dangerous characters and lecturing them on their sinful
course and warning them in unmistakable words of the consequences, he
afterwards said: "I could not have found courage of the kind you show in
this work; yet I never was considered lacking in courage on the field of
battle. When in the Crimea, I was sent frequently and