once a week. This was on
Saturday evening, when a free entertainment was given, consisting of
music, recitations, and other parlor accomplishments. The performances
were exceedingly artistic, according to the impartial judgment of
juvenile Wheeler Street. I can speak with authority for the crowd of
us from Number 11. We hung upon the lips of the beautiful ladies who
read or sang to us; and they in turn did their best, recognizing the
quality of our approval. We admired the miraculously clean gentlemen
who sang or played, as heartily as we applauded their performance.
Sometimes the beautiful ladies were accompanied by ravishing little
girls who stood up in a glory of golden curls, frilled petticoats, and
silk stockings, to recite pathetic or comic pieces, with trained
expression and practised gestures that seemed to us the perfection of
the elocutionary art. We were all a little bit stage-struck after
these entertainments; but what was more, we were genuinely moved by
the glimpses of a fairer world than ours which we caught through the
music and poetry; the world in which the beautiful ladies dwelt with
the fairy children and the clean gentlemen.

Brother Hotchkins, who managed these entertainments, knew what he was
there for. His programmes were masterly. Classics of the lighter sort
were judiciously interspersed with the favorite street songs of the
day. Nothing that savored of the chapel was there: the hour was
honestly devoted to entertainment. The total effect was an exquisitely
balanced compound of pleasure, wonder, and longing. Knock-kneed men
with purple noses, bristling chins, and no collars, who slouched in
sceptically and sat tentatively on the edge of the rear settees at the
beginning of the concert, moved nearer the front as the programme went
on, and openly joined in the applause at the end. Scowling fellows who
came in with defiant faces occasionally slunk out shamefaced; and both
the knock-kneed and the defiant sometimes remained to hear Brother
Tompkins pray and preach. And it was all due to Brother Hotchkins's
masterly programme. The children behaved very well, for the most part;
the few "toughs" who came in on purpose to make trouble were promptly
expelled by Brother Hotchkins and his lieutenants.

I could not help admiring Brother Hotchkins, he was so eminently
efficient in every part of the hall, at every stage of the
proceedings. I always believed that he was the author of the alluring
notices th