On the third floor of a tenement house, a missionary, Mr. B., found a comely, intelligent young English woman in great distress.  Her heart seemed wrung by grief.  A few kind words of sympathy drew from her the story of her woe.  She came to this country with her husband and three young children.  He was employed as book-keeper in a large mercantile house; but soon became addicted to drink, and the story is ever the same; loss of position, poverty, disgrace, suffering and recklessness.  On the day of the missionary’s visit, he was in a prison cell, committed as a vagrant and common drunkard.  The wife was bitterly weeping in her cheerless home, and the children around her fretting with hunger.  Mr. B. was so touched he could scarcely find words with which to console her, but turned to Isaiah and read, “For thy maker is thy husband; the Lord of Hosts is his name.”  “For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee.”  After his prayer, she felt calmer, and entreated him to come the next week, on the day her husband would be released.  He complied; found a prepossessing and cultivated man; and upon telling him how earnestly his wife and himself had prayed for him, was rejoiced to learn that in that lonesome cell the Spirit of God had visited him, filled him with a sincere wish to reform the future and redeem the past.  The missionary called again and again, and witnessed the strong determination of the young man to fight against his pernicious habit.  He was soon employed again in a large house, became a regular attendant at the Lord’s house, and began to pray both publicly and privately for help from on high.  Only a few months, and both husband and wife united with a church and became teachers in the Sabbath school.  Their own home, once laid waste, again blossomed like the rose.

PRAYING FOR TEA.

On a top floor in a street of tenements lives a colored woman one hundred and ten years old!  Her son, a man over seventy, lost his wife, a neat, active Christian woman, very suddenly, and his aged mother was plunged in despairing grief.  “Why, why was I left, old and rheumatic and useless, and Mary, a smart, busy, capable woman taken away without a minute’s warning?” was her continual cry.  But the son was left desolate, and the two rooms were to be kept clean, the meals provided before he left for his work in the morning, and after his work at night; there was no one else to do it, and love for him called out new effort.  With cane in one hand she treads the rooms back and forth, performing the household duties.  Eyes undimmed, faculties unimpaired, she does what she can.  Upon receiving a call a few months after the death of her daughter-in-law, she said—­“You’ve brought me a whole pound of that nice tea!  Well, honey, I asked the Lord for some good tea last night, and I knowed well enough it would be along some time to-day, cos He never keeps me waiting long.