ssionary on what he sometimes called a fishing excursion--fishing for
men! "I have come to give you a glass to-day, friends."

"Well, that's friendly," said a gruff voice in a secluded box, out of
which next minute staggered Ned Frog. "Come, what is't to be, old man?"

"A looking-glass," replied the missionary, picking out a tract from the
bundle he held in his hand and offering it to the ex-prize-fighter.
"But the tract is not the glass I speak of, friend: here it is, in the
Word of that God who made us all--made the throats that swallow the
drink, and the brains that reel under it."

Here he read from a small Bible, "`But they also have erred through
wine, and through strong drink are out of the way.'"

"Bah!" said Ned, flinging the tract on the floor and exclaiming as he
left the place with a swing; "I don't drink wine, old man; can't afford
anything better than beer, though sometimes, when I'm in luck, I have a
drop of Old Tom."

There was a great burst of ribald laughter at this, and numerous were
the witticisms perpetrated at the expense of the missionary, but he took
no notice of these for a time, occupying himself merely in turning over
the leaves of his Bible. When there was a lull he said:--

"Now, dear sisters," (turning to the women who, with a more or less
drunken aspect and slatternly air, were staring at him), "for sisters of
mine you are, having been made by the same Heavenly Father; I won't
offer you another glass,--not even a looking-glass,--for the one I have
already held up to you will do, if God's Holy Spirit opens your eyes to
see yourselves in it; but I'll give you a better object to look at. It
is a Saviour--one who is able to save you from the drink, and from sin
in every form. You know His name well, most of you; it is Jesus, and
that name means Saviour, for He came to save His people from their
sins."

At this point he was interrupted by one of the women, who seemed bent on
keeping up the spirit of banter with which they had begun. She asked
him with a leer if he had got a wife.

"No," he said, "but I have got a great respect and love for women,
because I've got a mother, and if ever there was a woman on the face of
this earth that deserves the love of a son, that woman is my mother.
Sister," he added, turning to one of those who sat on a bench near him
with a thin, puny, curly-haired boy wrapped up in her ragged shawl, "the
best prayer that I could offer up for you--and I _do_ o