As I made an end of praying, I looked up and saw standing beside me One, thorn-crowned and with wounded side, Whose features were the features of a man, but Whose face was the face of God.

And as I looked upon that face I shrank back dazed, and breathless, and blinded—­shrank back with a cry like the cry of one smitten of the lightning; for beneath the wide white brows there shone out eyes, before the awful purity of which my sin-stained soul seemed to scorch and to shrivel like a scroll in a furnace.  But as I lay, lo! there came a tender touch upon my head, and a voice in my ear that whispered, “Son.”

And as the word died away into a silence like the hallowed hush of listening angels, and I stretched forth my arms with a cry of unutterable longing and love, I say that He held one by the hand—­even the one who had plucked me out of the abyss into which I had fallen—­and I saw that it was Dorothy—­Dorothy whom He had sought out and saved from the shame to which my sin had driven her, and whom He had sent to succour me, that so He might set upon my soul the seal of His pardon and of His peace.

* * * * *

CHARLES KINGSLEY

Alton Locke

Charles Kingsley, English novelist, poet, and clergyman, was born June 12, 1819, and died Jan. 23, 1875.  The son of the rector of Chelsea, London, Kingsley went from King’s College, London, to Cambridge, taking his B.A. degree in 1842, and becoming rector of Eversley in 1844.  He was made one of the Queen’s chaplains in 1859, and in 1873 was appointed canon of Westminster.  After publishing “Village Sermons” and “The Saint’s Tragedy,” Kingsley took part with F.D.  Maurice in the Christian Socialist movement of 1848, attacking the horrible sweating then rife in the tailoring trade, calling attention to the miserable plight of the agricultural labourer, and the need for sanitary reform in town and country.  In “Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet,” first published in 1849, Kingsley writes from the point of view of the earnest artisan of sixty years ago, and the success of the book, following the author’s pamphlet on “Cheap Clothes and Nasty,” did much to stimulate social and philanthropic work in London and other great industrial centres.  Various editions of the novels of Kingsley are obtainable.

I.—­A Sweating Shop

I am a cockney among cockneys.

My earliest recollections are of a suburban street; of his jumble of little shops and little terraces.

My mother was a widow.  My father, whom I cannot recollect, was a small retail tradesman in the city.  He was unfortunate, and when he died, as many small tradesmen do, of bad debts and a broken heart, he left us beggars, and my mother came down and lived penuriously enough in that suburban street.

My mother moved by rule and method; by God’s law, as she considered, and that only.  She seldom smiled.  She never commanded twice without punishing.  And yet she kept the strictest watch over our morality.