om this illness, which left me far from strong, I
received a note from a companion, Will Sansom, asking me to make
haste and get well again, and help him in a Mission he had started
in a slum part of the town. No sooner was I able to get about than
I gladly joined him.

"The Meetings we held were very remarkable for those days. We used
to take out a chair into the street, and one of us mounting it
would give out a hymn, which we then sang with the help of, at the
most, three or four people. Then I would talk to the people, and
invite them to come with us to a Meeting in one of the houses.

"How I worked in those days! Remember that I was only an apprentice
lad of fifteen or sixteen. I used to leave business at 7 o'clock,
or soon after, and go visiting the sick, then these street
Meetings, and afterwards to some Meeting in a cottage, where we
would often get some one saved. After the Meeting I would often go
to see some dying person, arriving home about midnight to rest all
I could before rising next morning in time to reach my place of
business at 7 A.M. That was sharp exercise! How I can remember
rushing along the streets during my forty minutes' dinner-time,
reading the Bible or C. G. Finney's _Lectures on Revivals of
Religion_ as I went, careful, too, not to be a minute late. And at
this time I was far from strong physically; but full of
difficulties as those days were, they were nevertheless wonderful
seasons of blessing, and left pleasant memories that endure to this
hour.

"The leading men of the church to which I belonged were afraid I
was going too fast, and gave me plenty of cautions, quaking and
fearing at my every new departure; but none gave me a word of
encouragement. And yet the Society of which for those six
apprentice years I was a faithful member, was literally my heaven
on earth. Truly, I thought then there was one God, that John Wesley
was His prophet, and that the Methodists were His special people.
The church was at the time, I believe, one thousand members strong.
Much as I loved them, however, I mingled but little with them, and
had time for but few of their great gatherings, having chosen the
Meadow Platts as my parish, because my heart then as now went out
after the poorest of the poor.

"Thus my conversion ma