blowing "Nearer, my God, to
Thee" on his horn until his cheeks swelled almost to bursting. A
trumpet ever takes the Fourth Ward by storm. A class of little girls
is climbing upon the platform. Each wears a capital letter on her
breast, and has a piece to speak that begins with the letter; together
they spell its lesson. There is momentary consternation: one is
missing. As the discovery is made, a child pushes past the doorkeeper,
hot and breathless. "I am in 'Boundless Love,'" she says, and makes
for the platform, where her arrival restores confidence and the
language.

In the audience the befrocked visitor from up-town sits cheek by jowl
with the pigtailed Chinaman and the dark-browed Italian. Up in the
gallery, farthest from the preacher's desk and the tree, sits a Jewish
mother with three boys, almost in rags. A dingy and threadbare shawl
partly hides her poor calico wrap and patched apron. The woman shrinks
in the pew, fearful of being seen; her boys stand upon the benches,
and applaud with the rest. She endeavors vainly to restrain them.
"Tick, tick!" goes the old clock over the door through which wealth
and fashion went out long years ago, and poverty came in.

Tick, tick! the world moves, with us--without; without or with. She is
the yesterday, they the to-morrow. What shall the harvest be?

Loudly ticked the old clock in time with the doxology, the other day,
when they cleared the tenants out of Gotham Court down here in Cherry
Street, and shut the iron doors of Single and Double Alley against
them. Never did the world move faster or surer toward a better day
than when the wretched slum was seized by the health officers as a
nuisance unfit longer to disgrace a Christian city. The snow lies deep
in the deserted passageways, and the vacant floors are given over to
evil smells, and to the rats that forage in squads, burrowing in the
neglected sewers. The "wall of wrath" still towers above the buildings
in the adjoining Alderman's Court, but its wrath at last is wasted.

It was built by a vengeful Quaker, whom the alderman had knocked down
in a quarrel over the boundary line, and transmitted its legacy of
hate to generations yet unborn; for where it stood it shut out
sunlight and air from the tenements of Alderman's Court. And at last
it is to go, Gotham Court and all; and to the going the wall of wrath
has contributed its share, thus in the end atoning for some of the
harm it wrought. Tick! old clock; the worl