BY

THE REV. JOHN MACPHERSON,

_Author of "The Life of Duncan Mathieson."_


From East London to West Canada is a change pleasing to imagine.
From dusky lane and fetid alley to open, bright Canadian fields is,
in the very thought, refreshing. A child is snatched from pinching
hunger, fluttering rags, and all the squalor of gutter life; from a
creeping existence in the noisome pool of slum society is lifted up
into some taste for decency and cleanliness; from being trained in
the school whose first and last lesson is to fear neither God nor
man, is taught the beginnings of Christian faith and duty, and by a
strong effort of love and patience is borne away to the free,
spacious regions of the western hemisphere, of which it may be said,
as of the King's feast, "yet there is room," and where even a hapless
waif may get a chance and a choice both for this world and the world
that is to come. This is a picture on which a kind heart loves to
rest. But who shall make the picture real?

Go and first catch your little Arab, if you can. I say, if you can;
for he is too old to be caught by chaff, and you shall need as much
guile as any fowler ever did. Then with patient hands bestow on his
body its first baptism of clean water, a task often unspeakably
shocking; reduce to fit size and shape a cast-off suit humbly begged
for the occasion, and give him his first experience of decent
clothing. Thereafter, proceed to the work, sometimes the most trying
ever undertaken, of taming this singularly acute, desperately sly,