d curiously at the speaker. He was a young man, a
gas-fitter--to judge by the contents of the basket he seemed to have
brought in with him on his way from work--with eyes like live birds, and
small emaciated features. During the story Flaxman had noticed the man's
thin begrimed hand, as it rested on the bench in front of him, trembling
with excitement.

Another project of Robert's, started as soon as he had felt his way a
little in the district, was the scientific Sunday-school. This was the
direct result of a paragraph in Huxley's Lay Sermons, where the hint of
such a school was first thrown out. However, since the introduction of
science teaching into the Board schools, the novelty and necessity of
such a supplement to a child's ordinary education is not what it was.
Robert set it up mainly for the sake of drawing the boys out of the
streets in the afternoons, and providing them with some other food for
fancy and delight than larking and smoking and penny dreadfuls. A little
simple chemical and electrical experiment went down greatly; so did
a botany class, to which Elsmere would come armed with two stores
of flowers, one to be picked to pieces, the other to be distributed
according to memory and attention. A year before he had had a number of
large colored plates of tropical fruit and flowers prepared for him by a
Kew assistant. Those he would often set up on a large screen, or put
up on the walls, till the dingy school-room became a bower of superb
blossom and luxuriant leaf, a glow of red and purple and orange. And
then--still by the help of pictures--he would take his class on a
tour through strange lands, talking to them of China or Egypt or South
America, till they followed him up the Amazon, or into the pyramids or
through the Pampas, or into the mysterious buried cities of Mexico, as
the children of Hamelin followed the magic of the Pied Piper.

Hardly any of those who came to him, adults or children, while almost
all of the artisan class, were of the poorest class. He knew it, and had
laid his plans for such a result. Such work as he had at heart has no
chance with the lowest in the social scale, in its beginnings. It must
have something to work upon, and must penetrate downward. He only can
receive who already hath--there is no profounder axiom.

And meanwhile the months passed on, and he was still brooding, still
waiting. At last the spark fell.

There, in the next street but one to Elgood Street rose th