adjourn at midnight, this young man would go through the slums on his
way home, that he might relieve some poor child of misfortune.

On Sunday afternoons, while aristocracy lined the boulevards, this son
of fortune would take his physician in his carriage and go through the
slums, seeking the sick and suffering. One afternoon, while he stood
outside a tenement door, awaiting the return of the doctor from a
visit to a poor sick soul inside the tenement, he became deeply moved
by the ragged children playing in the gutters and reaching into
garbage barrels for crusts of bread. He said: "Ah! here's the riddle
of civilization. I wish I could help to solve it; perhaps I can."

He began the establishment of "ragged schools" and into these ware
gathered thousands of poor children. Then followed night schools for
boys who had to work by day. To these schools he added homes for
working women, and for these women he persuaded Parliament to give
shorter hours of service. He tore down old rookeries, built neat
dwellings instead, beneath the windows planted little flower gardens,
and rented them to the poor at the same price they had paid for the
rookeries.

When he began to fade, as the leaf fades in its autumn beauty, and the
day of his departure was at hand, he said: "I am sorry to leave the
world with so much misery in it, but I have lived to prove that every
kind word spoken, and every good deed done, sooner or later returns to
bless the giver."

As the end drew near he said to his daughter: "Read me the
twenty-third Psalm, for 'though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I fear no evil.'"