lled possessor of 500 pounds, and now he is dodging his
way among the casual wards of London, holding on to respectability and
his good connections by this poor black silk necktie.

Among the congregation was a bright-eyed, honest-looking lad bearing the
familiar name of John Smith. Three months ago he was earning his living
in a Yorkshire coal pit, when a strike among the men threw him out of
work. There being no prospect of doing anything in Yorkshire, he set out
for London, having, as he said, "heard it was a great place, where work
was plenty." With three shillings in his pocket he started from Leeds,
and walked to London, doing the journey in nine days. He had neither
recommendation nor introduction other than his bright, honest, and
intelligent face, and that seems to have served him only to the extent
of getting an odd job that occupied him two days.

The service opened with singing, of which there was a plentiful
repetition, the boys and girls in the foreground singing, the melancholy
throng behind standing dumb. Hymn-books were supplied to them, and if
they could read they might have found on the page from which the first
hymn was taken a hymn so curiously infelicitous to the occasion that it
is worth quoting a couple of verses. These are the two first:--

Let us gather up the sunbeams
Lying all around our path;
Let us keep the wheat and roses,
Casting out the thorns and chaff;
Let us find our sweetest comfort
In the blessings of to-day
With a patient hand removing
All the briars from the way.

Strange we never prize the music
Till the sweet-voiced bird has flown,
Strange that we should slight the violets
Till the lovely flowers are gone;
Strange that summer skies and sunshine
Never seem one half so fair
As when winter's snowy pinions
Shake the white down in the air.

After the opening hymns _Sankey's Sacred Song-Book_, in which this rhymed
nonsense appears, was abandoned, and the congregation took to the
admirable little selection of hymns compiled for the use of the
institution, containing much less sentiment, and perhaps on the whole
more suitable. After prayer and a short address, the boys and girls
filed out as they had come in. Then the rest of the congregation rose,
and as they passed out received a large piece of bread, supplemented by
the distribution from a room on a lower storey of a cup of hot c