"O Jesus, I thank Thee so much for letting me have some work to do for
Thee; and, please, I will stay outside the gates a little longer, to do
something to show Thee how I love Thee. Amen."

"Yes, Christie," said the clergyman, as he rose to go, "you must work
with a very loving heart. And when the work is over will come the
_rest_. After the long waiting will come 'Home, sweet Home.'"

"Yes," said Christie, brightly, "'there's no place like Home, no place
like Home.'"

CHAPTER XIII.

CHRISTIE'S WORK FOR THE MASTER.

It was a hot summer's afternoon, some years after, and the air in Ivy
Court was as close and stifling as it had been in the days when Christie
and old Treffy lived there. Crowds of children might still be seen
playing there, screaming and quarrelling, just as they had done then.
The air was as full of smoke and dust, and the court looked as desolate
as it had done in those years gone by. It was still a very dismal and a
very forlorn place.

So Christie thought, as he entered it that sultry day; it seemed to him
as far as ever from "Home, sweet Home." Yet, of all the places which he
visited as a Scripture-reader, there was no place in which Christie took
such an interest as Ivy Court. For he could not forget those dreary days
when he had been a little homeless wanderer, and had gone there for a
night's lodging. And he could not forget the old attic which had been
the first place, since his mother's death, that he had been able to call
home. It was to this very attic he was going this afternoon. He climbed
the rickety stairs, and as he did so he thought of the night when he had
crept up them for the first time, and had knelt down outside old
Treffy's door, listening to the organ. Christie had never parted with
that organ, his old master's last gift to him. And scarcely a week
passed that he did not turn the handle, and listen to the dear old
tunes. And he always finished with "Home, sweet Home," for he still
loved that tune the best. And when Miss Mabel came to see him, she
always wanted to turn the old organ in remembrance of her childish days.
She was not Miss Mabel any longer now, though Christie still sometimes
called her so when they were talking together of the old days, and of
Treffy and his organ. But Mabel was married now to the clergyman under
whom Christie was working, and she took great interest in the young
Scripture-reader, and was always ready to help him with her advice and
sym