re familiar to them as household words.

Lucy and Bessie, in their happy ignorance and inexperience, little
dreamed how many thousands in Christian cities full of stately
churches, whose lofty spires seem to proclaim afar the Christianity of
the inhabitants, grow up even to manhood and womanhood with as little
knowledge of the glorious redemption provided to rescue them from
their sin and degradation as if they were sunk in the thickest
darkness of heathenism. Strange that congregations of professed
followers of Christ, whose consciences will not let them refuse to
contribute some small portion of their substance to convey the glad
tidings of the gospel to distant lands, will yet, as they seek their
comfortable churches, pass calmly by whole districts where so many of
their fellow-countrymen are perishing for lack of that very gospel,
without making one personal effort to save them! Will they not have to
give an account for these things?

Nelly Connor's life had for the last two or three years been spent in
one of the lowest districts of the city in which her father had fixed
his abode after his emigration from the "old sod" to the New World.
The horrors of that emigration she could still remember--the
overcrowded steerage, where foul air bred the dreaded "ship-fever,"
and where the moans of the sick and dying weighed down the hearts of
those whom the disease had spared. Her two little sisters had died
during that dreadful voyage; and her mother, heart-broken and worn out
with fatigue and watching, only lived to reach land and die in the
nearest hospital. An elder brother, who was to have accompanied them,
had by some accident lost his passage; and though he had, they
supposed, followed them in the next ship that sailed, they never
discovered any further trace of him. So, when Nelly's father had
followed his wife to the grave in the poor coffin he had with
difficulty provided for her, he and his daughter were all that
remained of the family which had set out from their dear Irish home,
hoping, in the strange land they sought, to lay the foundation of
happier fortunes.

They led an uncomfortable, unsettled life for a year or two after
that, exchanging one miserable lodging for another--rarely for the
better. The father obtained an uncertain employment as a deck hand on
a steamboat during the summer, subsisting as best he could on odd jobs
during the winter, and too often drowning his sorrows and cares in the
tempting