“Lord, bless and pity us,
  Shine on us with Thy face;
  That the earth Thy way, and nations all
  May know Thy saving grace.”

And when the sermon came, and the preacher began to talk in thrilling words of that saving health which the Great Healer of souls had died to bring to all nations, Grace felt the reality of those unseen, eternal things of which he spoke as she had never done before.  Then there were interspersed with those faithful, burning words for God beautiful illustrations from nature, which fascinated the little girl’s imagination, as she sat gazing, not at the gilded cherubs to-night, but on the benignant, earnest face of the speaker.  He surely must have been a sailor, or he could never have known so well what a storm at sea was like, she thought, as she listened, spell-bound, feeling as if she was looking out on the angry sea, with the helpless wrecking ships tossing upon the waves; but then in another moment he took them into the thick of some ancient battle, where the brave-hearted “nobly conquering lived or conquering died;” or it was to some fair, pastoral scene, and then the preacher seemed to know so well all the delights of heathery hills and pleasant mossy glades, that Grace thought he certainly must have been at Kirklands and wandered among its woods and braes.  And into each of his wonderful photographs he wove many holy, stirring thoughts of God, and of those “ways” of his that may be known upon the earth, of which they had been singing.

Presently the preacher began to talk of what the worthy tinsmith had called the “new-fangled scheme,” for which, he said, he stood there to plead that evening.  He had come to ask help for the little outcast city children.  It was before the days when School Boards were born or thought of that this gallant-hearted man sought to move the feelings and rouse the consciences of men on behalf of those who seemed to have no helper.  It was for aid to establish schools for those destitute children, where they might be clothed and fed as well as educated, that he went on to plead.  Grace sat entranced, listening to the preacher, as with the “flaming swords of living words, he fought for the poor and weak.”  Never before in the course of her narrow, sheltered child-life had she, even in imagination, been brought face to face with the manifold wants and woes of her poorer brothers and sisters, or understood the service to which the Son of Man summons all his faithful followers:  “Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?”

It seemed to Grace, when the preacher had ceased, as if a new world of loving work and of duty stretched before her; for could she not become one of that band whom the preacher called in such thrilling words to enroll themselves in this service of love?