o join our band, but rather
praised the work she was doing in her place, telling her how I had heard
of it from Craig.

The summer found me religiously doing Paris and Vienna, gaining a more
perfect acquaintance with the extent and variety of my own ignorance,
and so fully occupied in this interesting and wholesome occupation
that I fell out with all my correspondents, with the result of weeks of
silence between us.

Two letters among the heap waiting on my table in London made my heart
beat quick, but with how different feelings: one from Graeme telling me
that Craig had been very ill, and that he was to take him home as soon
as he could be moved. Mrs. Mavor's letter told me of the death of the
old lady, who had been her care for the past two years, and of her
intention to spend some months in her old home in Edinburgh. And this
letter it is that accounts for my presence in a miserable, dingy, dirty
little hall running off a close in the historic Cowgate, redolent of
the glories of the splendid past, and of the various odours of the
evil-smelling present. I was there to hear Mrs. Mavor sing to the crowd
of gamins that thronged the closes in the neighbourhood, and that had
been gathered into a club by 'a fine leddie frae the West End,' for
the love of Christ and His lost. This was an 'At Home' night, and the
mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, of all ages and sizes were
present. Of all the sad faces I had ever seen, those mothers carried the
saddest and most woe-stricken. 'Heaven pity us!' I found myself saying;
'is this the beautiful, the cultured, the heaven-exalted city of
Edinburgh? Will it not, for this, be cast down into hell some day, if
it repent not of its closes and their dens of defilement? Oh! the utter
weariness, the dazed hopelessness of the ghastly faces! Do not the
kindly, gentle church-going folk of the crescents and the gardens see
them in their dreams, or are their dreams too heavenly for these ghastly
faces to appear?'

I cannot recall the programme of the evening, but in my memory-gallery
is a vivid picture of that face, sweet, sad, beautiful, alight with the
deep glow of her eyes, as she stood and sang to that dingy crowd. As I
sat upon the window-ledge listening to the voice with its flowing song,
my thoughts were far away, and I was looking down once more upon the
eager, coal-grimed faces in the rude little church in Black Rock. I was
brought back to find myself swallowing hard by an au