ng which they
were supposed to make out of orthodoxy. This the audience knew was
more than could be said of many of the opponents. Christ himself
showed his superb manhood in just such speaking out.

Indelibly impressed on my mind still is an occasion when one of the
most blatant and vicious of these opponents of religion fell ill. A
Salvation Army lass found him deserted and in poverty, nursed and
looked after him and eventually made a new man of him.

Far and away the most popular of the Park speakers was the Antiguan.
His arguments were so clever it was obvious that he was well and
widely read. His absolute understanding of the crowd and his witty
repartee used frequently to cause his opponents to lose their tempers,
and that was always their undoing. The crowd as a rule was very fair
and could easily distinguish arguments from abuse. Thus, on one Sunday
the debate was as to whether nature was God. The atheist
representative was a very loud-voiced demagogue, who when angry
betrayed his Hibernian origin very markedly. Having been completely
worsted and the laugh turned against him by a clever correction of
some one's, he used the few minutes given him to reply in violent
abuse, ending up that "ladies and gentlemen did not come out on
holidays to spend their time being taught English by a damned nigger."

"Sir," Edwards answered from the crowd, "I am a British subject, born
on the island of Antigua, and as much an Englishman as any Irishman in
the country."

Edwards possessed an inexhaustible stock of good-humour and his laugh
could be heard halfway across the Park. As soon as his turn came to
mount the stone, he got the crowd so good-natured that they became
angry at the interruptions of the enemy, and when some one suggested
that if nature were that man's God, the near-by duckpond was the
natural place for him, there was a rush for him, and for several
subsequent Sundays he was not in evidence. Edwards was a poor man, his
small salary and incessant generosity left him nothing for holidays,
and he was killing himself with overwork. So we asked him to join us
in the new house which we were fitting up in Palestine Place. He most
gladly did so and added enormously to our fun. Unfortunately
tuberculosis long ago got its grip upon him, and removed a valuable
life from East London.

It was a queer little beehive in which we lived in those days, and a
more cosmopolitan crowd could hardly have been found: one young doct