sway. The next night
the number was increased, and by the fourth or fifth evening the room
was so well filled both by boys and a large contingent of artisans,
that it seemed well to appoint a special evening in the week for
story-telling, or the recreation room would have been deserted.

In these performances Elsmere's aim had always been two-fold--the
rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the imaginative power
pure and simple. He ranged the whole world for stories. Sometimes it
would be merely some feature of London life itself--the history of a
great fire, for instance, and its hairbreadth escapes; a collision in
the river; a string of instances as true and homely and realistic
as they could be made of the way in which the poor help one another.
Sometimes it would be stories illustrating the dangers and difficulties
of particular trades--a colliery explosion and the daring of the
rescuers; incidents from the life of the great Northern iron-works, or
from that of the Lancashire factories; or stories of English country
life and its humors, given sometimes in dialect--Devonshire, or
Yorkshire, or Cumberland--for which he had a special gift. Or, again,
he would take the sea and its terrors--the immortal story of the
'Birkenhead;' the deadly plunge of the 'Captain;' the records of the
lifeboats, or the fascinating story of the ships of science, exploring
step by step, through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the
hills and valleys of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which
Mount Blanc might be buried without showing even his top-most snow-field
above the plain of waves. Then at other times it would be the simple
frolic and fancy of fiction--fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or
Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas;
to be followed perhaps on the next evening by the terse and vigorous
biography of some man of the people--of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas
Cooper or John Bright, or even of Thomas Carlyle.

One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flaxman, hearing
from Rose of the success of the experiment, went down to hear his new
acquaintance tell the story of Monte Cristo's escape from the Chateau
d'If. He started an hour earlier than was necessary, and with an
admirable impartiality he spent that hour at St. Wilfrid's hearing
vespers. Flaxman had a passion for intellectual or social novelty; and
this passion was beguiling him into a close observation of E