y and
sympathy and with more efficiency and foresight that he could ever
control, build up and organise ways of escape for much that he saw. He
could meet them too. But his work was to understand, and from his
understanding to attract and heal. The others had nothing to say to a
woman whose husband died, or whose son became crippled at work, to a man
who lost his right hand, or a girl whose sweetheart was drowned two days
before the wedding, and these things were always happening.

He looked round. He thought of his various speeches. It was no use
telling these people how many more women were arrested for drunkenness
in the streets this year than last, nor how many families lived in
cellars, nor how many men were without work. Their imaginations, never
straying into large numbers, would be blank. He would tell them stories
of men and women like themselves, and of how _they_ managed when
calamity came. He had sheaves of such stories and a ready tongue. He
might strike a spark of understanding. His voice, as he began to speak,
belied his appearance. It was sonorous and beautiful and it immediately
controlled his audience.

"My dear friends! Just round the corner from the house where I live,
there's a street called 'Paradise Street,' but I can tell you as I came
along here this morning in the lanes by the chapel, it seemed to me a
good deal more like Paradise than that street. It was a treat to smell
hawthorn hedges again, and to see some clear sky again, after the
foundries of stone-work, and I don't know what it is that makes people
give names like Angel Meadow, Paradise Row, Greenfield Street to the
dirtiest and smelliest streets in all the town. But I've got some very
good friends in this particular Paradise Street I was talking of, and if
they don't get an abundant entrance into the Paradise of our Saviour
when their time comes, I've mistaken His loving-kindness very sadly.

"Now, you'd hardly think that an old woman could be very happy living in
a cellar, without even a proper window to put a plant in, and six steps
to come up and down every time she went out and in, and drunken men
cursing and blaspheming up above in the street! Well! I'm going to tell
you a tale of one of the happiest old women I know, but I'm afraid it's
got to be about a day on which she wasn't happy at all.

"Her name's Jane Clark, and she lives in that cellar I'm speaking of on
2s. 6d. a week she has from the parish. She's a widow, and some