to
wear off, Robert often found himself filled with a strange flame and
ardour of hope! But his first steps had nothing to do with religion. He
made himself quickly felt in the night-school, and as soon as he
possibly could he hired a large room at the back of their existing room,
on the same floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might begin the
story-telling, which had been so great a success at Murewell. The
story-telling struck the neighbourhood as a great novelty. At first only
a few youths straggled in from the front room, where dominoes and
draughts and the illustrated papers held seductive sway. The next night
the number was increased, and by the fourth or fifth evening the room
was so well filled both by boys and a large contingent of artisans, that
it seemed well to appoint a special evening in the week for
story-telling, or the recreation room would have been deserted.

In these performances Elsmere's aim had always been twofold--the rousing
of moral sympathy and the awakening of the imaginative power pure and
simple. He ranged the whole world for stories. Sometimes it would be
merely some feature of London life itself--the history of a great fire,
for instance, and its hairbreadth escapes; a collision in the river; a
string of instances as true and homely and realistic as they could be
made of the way in which the poor help one another. Sometimes it would
be stories illustrating the dangers and difficulties of particular
trades--a colliery explosion and the daring of the rescuers; incidents
from the life of the great Northern ironworks, or from that of the
Lancashire factories; or stories of English country life and its
humours, given sometimes in dialect--Devonshire, or Yorkshire, or
Cumberland--for which he had a special gift. Or, again, he would take
the sea and its terrors--the immortal story of the _Birkenhead_; the
deadly plunge of the _Captain_; the records of the lifeboats, or the
fascinating story of the ships of science, exploring step by step,
through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the hills and valleys
of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which Mont Blanc might be
buried without showing even his topmost snowfield above the plain of
waves. Then at other times it would be the simple frolic and fancy of
fiction--fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes
from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas; to be followed perhaps on
the next evening by the terse