produced.

The boys were emphatically bad boys. They feared neither God nor man.
The property of other people was their chief source of livelihood, and
the streets, or the jails, were their homes. Nevertheless, when in the
garden class, those boys were patterns of good behaviour, because each
boy knew that if he did not behave and keep quiet he would infallibly be
dismissed from the class, and this was a punishment which none of them
could endure. Unlike many other teachers, Susy had not to go about
enticing boys to her Sabbath class. Her chief difficulty was to prevent
them coming in such numbers as would have overflowed the garden
altogether.

And the secret of this was that Susy Blake possessed much of an
unconscious influence called loving-kindness. No weapon of the
spiritual armoury is equal to this. In the hands of a man it is
tremendous. In those of a pretty girl it is irresistible. By means of
it she brought the fiercest little arabs of the slums to listen to the
story of Jesus and His love. She afterwards asked God, the Holy Spirit,
to water the good seed sown, and the result was success.

But loving-kindness was not her only weapon. She had in addition quite
a glittering little armoury in which were such weapons as play of fancy,
lively imagination, fervent enthusiasm, resolute purpose, fund of
anecdote, sparkling humour, intense earnestness, and the like, all of
which she kept flashing around the heads of her devoted worshippers
until they were almost beside themselves with astonishment, repentance,
and good resolves. Of course, when away from her influence the
astonishment was apt to diminish, the repentance to cease, and the good
resolves to vanish away; but resolute purpose had kept Susy at them
until in the course of time there was a perceptible improvement in the
environment of Cherub Court, and a percentage of souls rescued from the
ranks of the ragamuffins.

On this particular Sunday Tommy Splint, who was a regular attendant at
the garden class, arrived late.

"Why, Tommy," said the teacher, turning herself from a little boy on
whom she had been trying specially to impress some grand eternal truth,
"this is not like you. Has anything happened to detain you?"

"No, Susy," answered the boy, slipping into his place--with a compound
expression in which the spirit of fun, whom no one doubted, gave the lie
to the spirit of penitence, in whom no one believed--"but I've bin to a
sort o' Sun