ished articles in derision of the madness, with
accounts of similar frenzies which had laid hold of London before. There
was a run on the banks, men sold their businesses, dissolved their
partnerships, transferred their stocks, and removed to houses outside the
suburbs. Great losses were sustained in all ranks of society, and the
only class known to escape were the Jews on the Exchange, who held their
peace and profited by their infidelity.

When people asked themselves who the author and origin of the panic was
they thought instantly and with one accord of a dark-eyed, lonely man,
who walked the streets of London in the black cassock of a monk, with the
cord and three knots which were the witness of life vows. No dress could
have shown to better advantage his dark-brown face and tall figure.
Something majestic seemed to hang about the man. His big lustrous eyes,
his faint smile with its sad expression always behind it, his silence,
his reserve, his burning eloquence when he preached--seemed to lay siege
to the imagination of the populace, and especially to take hold as with a
fiery grip of the impassioned souls of women.

A certain mystery about his life did much to help this extraordinary
fascination. When London as a whole became conscious of him it was
understood that he was in some sort a nobleman as well as a priest, and
had renounced the pleasures and possessions of the world and given up all
for God. His life was devoted to the poor and outcast, especially to the
Magdalenes and their unhappy children. Although a detached monk still and
living in obedience to the rule of one of the monastic brotherhoods of
the Anglican Church, he was also vicar of a parish in Westminster. His
church was a centre of religious life in that abandoned district, having
no fewer than thirty parochial organizations connected with it, including
guilds, clubs, temperance societies, savings banks, and, above all,
shelters and orphanages for the girls and their little ones, who were the
vicar's especial care.

His chief helpers were a company of devoted women, drawn mainly from the
fashionable fringe which skirted his squalid district and banded together
as a Sisterhood. For clerical help he depended entirely on the brothers
of his society, and the money saved by these voluntary agencies he
distributed among the poor, the sick, and the unfortunate. Money of his
own he had none, and his purse was always empty by reason of his
free-handedne