Mr. Lane replied promptly that Mr. Sower was to do no such thing.  “Your factory,” said he, “is your field.  That is the work God has given you to do.  It is your parish.  Do not leave it for another—­only do not forget that you have to give an account of your parochial charge.  You are to study, not how to get the most money out of your four hundred workmen, but how to do them the most good.  That is Christian duty for you.  But your case is very peculiar.  There is not one man in a thousand situated as you are.”

Then I began to think that perhaps my law office was my field.  It gives me enough to do I am sure.  We are not all drones who are not working for the Church.  There is a work for Christ outside.  And I do not want to take a Sabbath-school class.  I want Sunday mornings to myself.  Every other morning I have to be an early riser.  I do enjoy being lazy Sunday morning.

But then there is that class of young men from the mill.  Deacon Goodsole says they don’t know anything.  He has no one who can manage them.  And Mr. Work thinks it’s a dreadful sin, I do not doubt, that I do not take it at once.  I do not care much for that.  But Jennie says I am just the one to manage these boys if I feel like undertaking it.  And I would like to prove her good opinion of me true.

I was just in that perplexity when night before last a meeting on behalf of the City Mission Society was held here.  Mr. Mingins, the Superintendent of city missions, was one of the speakers.

He made an earnest and at times a really eloquent speech.  He would have made a splendid jury lawyer.  He depicted in the most lively colors the wretched condition of the outcast population of New York.  With all the eloquence of a warm heart, made more attractive by his broad Scotch, he pled with us to take an active part in their amelioration.  “Pure religion and undefiled, before God and the Father, is this,” cried he, “to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

I resolved to take up that class of Mission boys straightways.  But as I came out I met Hattie Bridgeman.  She is an old friend of Jennie’s and has had a hard, hard life.  Her husband is an invalid.  Her children are thrown on her for support.  As I met her at the door she pressed my hand without speaking.  I could see by the trembling lip and the tearful eye, that her heart was full.  “I wish I had not come to-night,” she said, as we walked along together.  “Such stories make my heart bleed.  It seems as though I ought to go right out to visit the sick, comfort the afflicted, care for the neglected.  But what can I do?  My children are dependent on me.  These six weeks at Wheathedge are my only vacation.  The rest of the time I am teaching music from Monday morning till Saturday night.  Sunday, when I ought to rest, is my most exhausting day.  For then I sing in church.  If I were to leave my scholars my children would starve.  How can I do anything for my Savior?”