The usual New England religious audience was not to be seen in the Church of the Love of Christ in Angel Alley. The unusual, plainly, was. The wealth and what the “Windover Topsail” called the society of Windover were sparsely represented on those hard settees. The clean, sober faces of respectable families were out in good force; these bore the earnest, half-perplexed, wholly pathetic expression of uninfluential citizens who find themselves suddenly important to and responsible for an unpopular movement; a class of people who do not get into fiction or history, and who deserve a quality of respect and sympathy which they do not receive; the kind of person who sets us to wondering what was the personal view of the situation dully revolving in the minds of Peter and the sons of Zebedee when they put their nets to dry upon the shores of Galilee, and tramped up and down Palestine at the call of a stronger and diviner mind, wondering what it meant, and how it would all end. These good people, not quite certain whether their own reputations were injured or bettered by the fact, sat side by side with men and women who are not known to the pews of churches. The homeless were there, and the hopeless, the sinning, the miserable, the disgraced, the neglected, the “rats” of the wharves, and the outcasts of the dens. The stranger stood packed in, elbow to elbow between an Italian who served the country of his adoption upon the town waterworks, and a dark-browed Portuguese sailor. American fishermen, washed and shaven, in their Sunday clothes, filled the rear seats. Against the wall, lines of rude, red faces crowded like cattle at a spring; men of the sea and the coast, men without homes or characters; that uninteresting and dangerous class which we dismiss in two idle words as the “floating population.” Some of these men were sober; some were not; others were hovering midway between the two conditions: all were orderly, and a few were listening with evidences of emotion to the hymn, in which by far the greater portion of the audience joined. A girl wearing a Tam o’ Shanter and a black fur cape, and singing in a fine, untrained contralto, held her hymn-book over the settee to the Italian. “Come, Tony! Pass it along!” she whispered, “I can get on without it. Make ’em pile in and sing along the wall, there!” With rude and swelling cadence the fishermen sang:-- “I need Thee every hour, Most gracious Lord.” Their voices and their hearts rose high on one of those plaintive popular melodies of which music need never be ashamed:-- “I need Thee, oh, I need Thee, Every hour I need Thee; Oh, bless me now, my Saviour”.... The stranger, who had the appearance of a religious man, joined in the chorus heartily; he shared the book which the girl had given to the Italian, who came in a bar too late, and closed the stanza on a shrill solo,-- “I co--home to thee.”