“What is car-fare to New Haven or to anywhere, to Him?”

“But,” I replied materially, “you haven’t any car-fare when you go there—­how do you actually get it?  Who gives it to you?  Give me one instance.”

“Why, it was only last week, brother, that a woman wrote me from Maiden, Massachusetts, wanting me to come and see her.  She’s very sick with consumption, and she thought she was going to die.  I used to know her in Noank, and she thought if she could get to see me she would feel better.

“I didn’t have any money at the time, but that didn’t make any difference.

“‘Lord,’ I said, ’here’s a woman sick in Maiden, and she wants me to come to her.  I haven’t got any money, but I’ll go right down to the depot, in time to catch a certain train,’ and I went.  And while I was standing there a man came up to me and said, ’Brother, I’m told to give you this,’ and he handed me ten dollars.”

“Did you know the man?” I exclaimed.

“Never saw him before in my life,” he replied, smiling genially.

“And didn’t he say anything more than that?”

“No.”

I stared at him, and he added, as if to take the edge off my astonishment: 

“Why, bless your heart, I knew he was from the Lord, just the moment I saw him coming.”

“You mean to say you were standing there without a cent, expecting the Lord to help you, and He did?”

“‘He shall call upon me, and I shall answer him,’” he answered simply, quoting the Ninety-first Psalm.

This incident was still the subject of my inquiry when a little colored girl came out of the yard and paused a moment before us.

“May I go down across the bridge, papa?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered, and then as she tripped away, said: 

“She’s one of my adopted children.”  He gazed between his knees at the sidewalk.

“Have you many others?”

“Three.”

“Raising them, are you?”

“Yes.”

“They seem to think, down in Noank, that living as you do and giving everything away is satisfactory to you but rather hard on your wife and children.”

“Well, it is true that she did feel a little uncertain in the beginning, but she’s never wanted for anything.  She’ll tell you herself that she’s never been without a thing that she really needed, and she’s been happy.”

He paused to meditate, I presume, over the opinion of his former fellow townsmen, and then added: 

“It’s true, there have been times when we have been right where we had to have certain things pretty badly, before they came, but they never failed to come.”

While he was still talking, Mrs. Potter came around the corner of the house and out upon the sidewalk.  She was going to the Saturday evening market in the city below.

“Here she is,” he said.  “Now you can ask her.”

“What is it?” she inquired, turning a serene and smiling face to me.