--and as he did so, Mantel sprang back among the
shadows just in time to escape his observation. The full-throated music,
floating on the motionless air, fell upon his ear like a benediction. He
listened, and caught the words of a hymn with which he had been familiar
in his childhood:

"Light of those whose dreary dwelling
Borders on the shades of death!
Rise on us, thy love revealing,
Dissipate the clouds beneath.
Thou of heaven and earth creator--
In our deepest darkness rise,
Scattering all the night of nature,
Pouring day upon our eyes."

By the spell of this mysterious music he was drawn back into the living
world--drawn as if by some powerful magnet.

Pain and sorrow had become tired of vexing him at last, and now
stretched forth their hands in a ministry of consolation. With his eyes
fixed on the spot from which the music issued, he moved unconsciously
toward it, Mantel following him.

A few moments' walking brought him to a weird spectacle. A torch had
been erected above a low platform on which stood a man of most unique
and striking personality. He looked like a giant in the wavering light
of the torch. He was dressed in the simple garb of a Quaker; his head
was bare; great locks of reddish hair curled round his temples and fell
down upon his shoulders. His massive countenance bespoke an
extraordinary mind, and beamed with rest and peace.

As he sang the old familiar hymn, he looked around upon his audience
with an expression such as glowed, no doubt, from the countenance of the
Christ when He spoke to the multitudes on the shores of Lake Genessaret.

Close to the small platform was a circle of street Arabs, awed into
silence and respect by the charm of this remarkable personality. Next to
them came a ring of women--some of them old and gray, with haggard and
wrinkled countenances upon which Time, with his antique pen, had traced
many illegible hieroglyphs; some of them young and bedizened with tinsel
jewelry and flashy clothing; not a few of them middle-aged, wan,
dispirited and bearing upon their hips bundles wrapped in faded shawls,
from which came occasionally that most distressing of sounds, the wail
of an ill-fed and unloved infant, crying in the night.

Outside of this zone of female misery and degradation, there was a belt
of masculine stupidity and crime; men with corpulent bodies, bull necks,
double chins, pile-driving heads; men of shrunken frames, ca