ther, this woman is in thy hands. Take thou care of her, as thou hast
taken care of her hitherto. Let the light go up in her soul, that she
may love and trust thee, O light, O gladness. I thank thee that thou
hast blessed me with this ministration. Now lead me to my father. Thine
is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.'

He rose and went to his grandmother and told her all. She put her arms
round his neck, and kissed him, and said,

'God bless ye, my bonny lad. And he will bless ye. He will; he will. Noo
gang yer wa's, and do the wark he gies ye to do. Only min', it's no you;
it's him.'

The next morning, the sweet winds of his childhood wooing him to remain
yet a day among their fields, he sat on the top of the Aberdeen coach,
on his way back to the horrors of court and alley in the terrible
London.

CHAPTER VII. THE SILK-WEAVER.

When he arrived he made it his first business to find 'Widow Walker.'
She was evidently one of the worst of her class; and could it have been
accomplished without scandal, and without interfering with the quietness
upon which he believed that the true effect of his labours in a large
measure depended, he would not have scrupled simply to carry off the
child. With much difficulty, for the woman was suspicious, he contrived
to see her, and was at once reminded of the child he had seen in the
cart on the occasion of Shargar's recognition of his mother. He fancied
he saw in her some resemblance to his friend Shargar. The affair ended
in his paying the woman a hundred and fifty pounds to give up the girl.
Within six months she had drunk herself to death. He took little Nancy
Kennedy home with him, and gave her in charge to his housekeeper. She
cried a good deal at first, and wanted to go back to Mother Walker, but
he had no great trouble with her after a time. She began to take a share
in the house-work, and at length to wait upon him. Then Falconer began
to see that he must cultivate relations with other people in order
to enlarge his means of helping the poor. He nowise abandoned his
conviction that whatever good he sought to do or lent himself to aid
must be effected entirely by individual influence. He had little faith
in societies, regarding them chiefly as a wretched substitute, just
better than nothing, for that help which the neighbour is to give to
his neighbour. Finding how the unbelief of the best of the poor is
occasioned by hopelessness in pri