GS ARE GROWING. 142
XXXVI. A CRISIS. 143
XXXVII. THE HAPPY GATHERING. 151

SUE: A LITTLE HEROINE.

CHAPTER I.

BIG BEN'S VOICE.

Sue made a great effort to push her way to the front of the crowd. The
street preacher was talking, and she did not wish to lose a word. She
was a small, badly made girl, with a freckled face and hair inclined to
red, but her eyes were wonderfully blue and intelligent. She pushed and
pressed forward into the thick of the crowd. She felt a hand on her
shoulder, and looking up, saw a very rough man gazing at her.

"Be that you, Peter Harris?" said Sue. "An' why didn't yer bring Connie
along?"

"Hush!" said some people in the crowd.

The preacher raised his voice a little higher:

"'Tell His disciples and Peter that He goeth before you into Galilee.'"

Peter Harris, the rough man, trembled slightly. Sue found herself
leaning against him. She knew quite well that his breath was coming
fast.

"His disciples and Peter," she said to herself.

The street preacher had a magnificent voice. It seemed to roll above the
heads of the listening crowd, or to sink to a penetrating whisper which
found its echo in their hearts. The deep, wonderful eyes of the man had
a power of making people look at him. Sue gazed with all her might and
main.

"Father John be a good un," she said to herself. "He be the best man in
all the world."

After the discourse--which was very brief and full of stories, and just
the sort which those rough people could not help listening to--a hymn
was sung, and then the crowd dispersed.

Sue was amongst them. She was in a great hurry. She forgot all about
John Atkins, the little street preacher to whom she had been listening.
She soon found herself in a street which was gaily lighted; there was a
gin-palace at one end, another in the middle, and another at the farther
end. This was Saturday night: Father John was fond of holding vigorous
discourses on Saturday nights. Sue stopped to make her purchases. She
was well-known in the neighborhood, and as she stepped in and out of one
shop and then of another, she was the subject of a rough jest or a
pleasant laugh, just as the mood of the person she addressed prompted
one or other. She spent a few pence out of her meager purse, her
purchases were put into a little basket, and she found her way home. The
season was winter. She turned into a s