CAST OUT INTO THE STREET, YET NOT FORSAKEN.


A piteous wail was heard on the street one day, and a poor Scotchman
crossed over to see the trouble. A widow and three children sat on their
few articles of household furniture. Put in the street, when they could
no longer find five dollars for the rent of the kennel in which, for six
months, they had not lived, but existed. He had just received five
dollars for a piece of work, and was hurrying home with it to his sick
wife, crippled mother and two children. He thought of the piece of
meat--a long untasted luxury--he meant to buy; of the tea his mother so
much craved, and hesitated. Could he give these up? But the streaming
eyes of the children, and the mute despair on the face of the mother,
took down the scale. He ran several blocks and found an empty basement;
hired it for four dollars; enlisted the sympathy and help of a colored
boy to carry the furniture; put up the stove, bought a bundle of wood,
pail of coal, and some provisions with the other dollar; held a little
prayer-meeting on the spot, and left with the benedictions of the
distressed ones filling his ears. The recital of his adventure
obliterated for the time all sense of their own desires, and they
thanked God together that their loss had been the widow's gain. The next
morning, while taking their frugal meal, a tea dealer, for whom this man
had frequently put up shelves, came to say he was short-handed, and if
the Scotchman was not very busy, he would give him a regular position in
his establishment, at a better salary than he could hope to earn.
Meanwhile, hearing his wife was sick, he had brought her a couple pounds
prime tea, and it occurred to him that venison steaks were a little out
of the ordinary run of meat, and, as he had a quantity at home, he
brought a couple. Thus the Lord answered the prayer of the poor, and