e the storm like a man!" I urged, and he said:

"It will kill me, but I will do it."

He did it, and it swept him to prison, to shame, and to oblivion.

_A St. Francis of the Bunk-house_

One Sunday afternoon I was going through the dormitories, calling the
lodgers to prayer. On one of the ten-cent cots an old white-haired man
was reading a life of Buffalo Bill. His face was marred by a scar over
one of the eyes. He spoke gently and with a pronounced Irish accent.

[Illustration: "ONE NIGHT THE GRAF WAS PREVAILED UPON TO TELL HIS STORY"]

"I am an Episcopalian," he said, when I invited him below to the
meeting.

"We have all denominations," I assured him. Everybody in the
bunk-house had a connection, more or less remote, with some sect.

"Say," said the bouncer, concerning the old man, "dat ol' duffer's got
de angel goods on him O.K."

[Illustration: THE SITTING-ROOM OF THE BISMARCK]

His name was Edward Dowling. He was a gentleman. He had soldiered
under Sir Colin Campbell and Sir Henry Havelock in India. Later he
owned a ranch in the West. Then an accident deprived him of the use of
an eye, and he spent all he had in trying to preserve his sight.
Homeless and penniless on the streets of New York, he had learned to
do tinkering and the mending of umbrellas.

In his poverty he drifted to the bunk-house.

The following Sunday, at our meeting, he had an awakening which
reminded me of the account of Paul's conversion on the way to
Damascus. It revolutionized his mental processes, and he began to give
outward expression to his new-found inner joy.

He would buy some stale bread overnight, and early in the morning he
would make coffee on the bunk-house stove in a quart tomato-can. Each
man, before he left the place, had a bite of stale bread and at least
a mouthful of warm coffee. Then they would uncover their heads while
the old man asked God to bless them for the day.

He tinkered for a living, but his vocation became the conversion of
men. From these small beginnings in quiet evangelism, he branched out
into work of the same kind among the tenements. He mended pots,
kettles, and pans, and charged for the job a chapter in the Bible. I
came on him suddenly one morning in an alley. Snow was on the ground,
and he was reading a chapter with his face close to a broken pane. It
appeared he had done some soldering for an Irishwoman, and asked the
privilege of reading to her.

"Begorra," she said, "the house is