his dry bread and sausage taste sweeter than
anything that had passed his lips for weeks.

Something more than the food he had taken steadied the man's nerves and
allayed his thirst. Love was beating back into his heart--love for this
homeless wanderer, whose coming had supplied the lost links in the chain
which bound him to the past and called up memories that had slept almost
the sleep of death for years. Good resolutions began forming in his
mind.

"It may be," he said to himself as new and better impressions than he
had known for a long time began to crowd upon him, "that God has led
this baby here."

The thought sent a strange thrill to his soul. He trembled with excess
of feeling. He had once been a religious man; and with the old instinct
of dependence on God, he clasped his hands together with a sudden,
desperate energy, and looking up, cried, in a half-despairing,
half-trustful voice,

"Lord, help me!"

No earnest cry like that ever goes up without an instant answer in the
gift of divine strength. The man felt it in a stronger purpose and a
quickening hope. He was conscious of a new power in himself.

"God being my helper," he said in the silence of his heart, "I will be a
man again."

There was a long distance between him and a true manhood. The way
back was over very rough and difficult places, and through dangers and
temptations almost impossible to resist. Who would have faith in him?
Who would help him in his great extremity? How was he to live? Not any
longer by begging or petty theft. He must do honest work. There was no
hope in anything else. If God were to be his helper, he must be honest,
and work. To this conviction he had come.

But what was to be done with Andy while he was away trying to earn
something? The child might get hurt in the street or wander off in his
absence and never find his way back. The care he felt for the little one
was pleasure compared to the thought of losing him.

As for Andy, the comfort of a good breakfast and the feeling that he
had a home, mean as it was, and somebody to care for him, made his heart
light and set his lips to music.

When before had the dreary walls of that poor hovel echoed to the happy
voice of a light-hearted child? But there was another echo to the voice,
and from walls as long a stranger to such sounds as these--the walls in
the chambers of that poor man's memory. A wellnigh lost and ruined soul
was listening to the far-off voices of chil