“What’s the matter, son?  Stuck?” he said once to a newsboy who was crying with a heavy bundle of papers under his arm.

“Come along with me, then,” said Mr. Beecher, taking the boy’s hand and leading him into the newspaper office a few doors up the street.

“This boy is stuck,” he simply said to the man behind the counter.  “Guess The Eagle can stand it better than this boy; don’t you think so?”

To the grown man Mr. Beecher rarely gave charity.

He believed in a return for his alms.

“Why don’t you go to work?” he asked of a man who approached him one day in the street.

“Can’t find any,” said the man.

“Looked hard for it?” was the next question.

“I have,” and the man looked Mr. Beecher in the eye.

“Want some?” asked Mr. Beecher.

“I do,” said the man.

“Come with me,” said the preacher.  And then to Edward, as they walked along with the man following behind, he added:  “That man is honest.”

“Let this man sweep out the church,” he said to the sexton when they had reached Plymouth Church.

“But, Mr. Beecher,” replied the sexton with wounded pride, “it doesn’t need it.”

“Don’t tell him so, though,” said Mr. Beecher with a merry twinkle of the eye; and the sexton understood.

Mr. Beecher was constantly thoughtful of a struggling young man’s welfare, even at the expense of his own material comfort.  Anxious to save him from the labor of writing out the newspaper articles, Edward, himself employed during the daylight hours which Mr. Beecher preferred for his original work, suggested a stenographer.  The idea appealed to Mr. Beecher, for he was very busy just then.  He hesitated, but as Edward persisted, he said:  “All right; let him come to-morrow.”

The next day he said:  “I asked that stenographer friend of yours not to come again.  No use of my trying to dictate.  I am too old to learn new tricks.  Much easier for me to write myself.”

Shortly after that, however, Mr. Beecher dictated to Edward some material for a book he was writing.  Edward naturally wondered at this, and asked the stenographer what had happened.

“Nothing,” he said.  “Only Mr. Beecher asked me how much it would cost you to have me come to him each week.  I told him, and then he sent me away.”

That was Henry Ward Beecher!

Edward Bok was in the formative period between boyhood and young manhood when impressions meant lessons, and associations meant ideals.  Mr. Beecher never disappointed.  The closer one got to him, the greater he became—­in striking contrast to most public men, as Edward had already learned.

Then, his interests and sympathies were enormously wide.  He took in so much!  One day Edward was walking past Fulton Market, in New York City, with Mr. Beecher.

“Never skirt a market,” the latter said; “always go through it.  It’s the next best thing, in the winter, to going South.”