“And you really think there is gain?”

“I know it,” answered the missionary, with a ringing confidence in his voice.  “It is by comparisons that we are able to get at true results.  Come with me into our school-room, next door.”

They passed from the office of the mission into the street.

“These buildings,” said Mr. Paulding, “erected by that true Christian charity which hopeth all things, stand upon the very site of one of the worst dens once to be found in this region.  In them we have a chapel for worship, two large and well ventilated school-rooms, where from two to three hundred children that would not be admitted into any public school are taught daily, a hospital and dispensary and bathrooms.  Let me show you the school.  Then I will give you a measure of comparison.”

Mr. Dinneford went up to the school-rooms.  He found them crowded with children, under the care of female teachers, who seemed to have but little trouble in keeping them in order.  Such a congregation of boys and girls Mr. Dinneford had never seen before.  It made his heart ache as he looked into some of their marred and pinched, faces, most of which bore signs of pain, suffering, want and evil.  It moved him to tears when he heard them sing, led by one of the teachers, a tender hymn expressive of the Lord’s love for poor neglected children.

“The Lord Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost,” said the missionary as they came down from the school-room, “and we are trying to do the same work.  And that our labor is not all in vain will be evident when I show you what this work was in the beginning.  You have seen a little of what it is now.”

They went back to the office of the missionary.

“It is nearly twenty years,” said Mr. Paulding, “since the organization of our mission.  The question of what to do for the children became at once the absorbing one.  The only building in which to open a Sunday-school that could be obtained was an old dilapidated frame house used as a receptacle for bones, rags, etc.; but so forbidding was its aspect, and so noisome the stench arising from the putrefying bones and rotting rags, that it was feared for the health of those who might occupy it.  However it was agreed to try the effect of scraping, scrubbing, white-washing and a liberal use of chloride of lime.  This was attended with such good effects that, notwithstanding the place was still offensive to the olfactories, the managers concluded to open in it our first Sabbath-school.

“No difficulty was experienced in gathering in a sufficient number of children to compose a school; for, excited by such a novel spectacle as a Sabbath-school in that region, they came in crowds.  But such a Sabbath-school as that first one was beyond all doubt the rarest thing of the kind that any of those interested in its formation had ever witnessed.  The jostling, tumbling, scratching, pinching, pulling of hair, little ones crying and larger ones punching each other’s heads and swearing most profanely, altogether formed a scene of confusion and riot that disheartened the teachers in the start, and made them begin to think they had undertaken a hopeless task.