"Many might with profit. You can carry messages from Mr. Ivison, can you not take a message from your Divine Master? I have thought it all over, and can tell you where you will be listened to at least, and where you may do much good. I went, last Sunday, to the same prison in which I visited you. and I read to the inmates. It would be a moral triumph for you, Egbert, to go back there as a Christian man and with the honest purpose of doing good. It would be very pleasant for me to think of you at work there every Sabbath. Make the attempt, to please me, if for no better reason." "That settles the question, Mrs. Arnot," said Haldane, with a troubled smile. "I would try to preach in Choctaw, if you requested it, and I fear all that I can say 'out o' my own head,' as Mr. Growther would put it, will be worse than Choctaw. But I can at least read to the prisoners; that is," he added, with downcast eyes and a flush of his old shame, "if they will listen to me, which I much doubt. You, with your large generous sympathies, can never understand how greatly I am despised, even by my own class." "Please remember that I am of your class now, for you are of the household of faith. I know what you mean, Egbert. I am glad that you are so diffident and so little inclined to ask on the ground of your Christian profession that the past be overlooked. If there is one thing that disgusts me more than another it is the disposition to make one's religion a stepping-stone to earthly objects and the means of forcing upon others a familiarity or a relationship that is offensive to them. I cannot help doubting a profession of faith that is put to such low uses. I know that you have special reason for humility, but you must not let it develop into timidity. All I ask is that you read to such poor creatures in the prison as will listen to you a chapter in the Bible, and explain it as well as you can, and then read something else that you think will interest them." Haldane made the attempt, and met, at first, as he feared, with but indifferent success. Even criminals looked at him askance as he came in the guise of a religious teacher. But his manner was so unassuming, and the spirit "I am better than thou" was so conspicuously absent, that a few were disarmed, and partly out of curiosity, and partly to kill the time that passed so slowly, they gathered at his invitation. He sat down among them as if one of them, and in a voice that trembled with diffidence read a chapter from the gospels. Since he "put on no airs," as they said, one and another drew near until all the inmates of the jail were grouped around him. Having finished the chapter, Haldane closed the Bible and said: