If anything that may be written hereafter concerning some representative (large and small, but still truly representative) efforts to do the work that Christianity demands as its first evidence of reality, should lead to a deeper and wider personal interest in their behalf, it will be matter for rejoicing. The larger the number of people who ask what is being done, the greater will be the desire to continue the good work, or to declare it. The attention that might in this way be directed to the mode of affording relief would exercise so keen an influence in the reformation of abuses, and the adoption of improvements, that all our charities would soon become truly "public." With the more earnest conviction of the duty of personal inquiry, and real sympathetic interest in the {8} individual well-being of our poorer brother or sister, would come the satisfaction that we belonged to an association, or to a chain of associations, which will afford to him or to her the very relief which otherwise we should despair of securing. I purpose in another chapter to ask you to read the story of an institution that was in its day wonderfully illustrative, and even now serves to take us back for two centuries of history. Only yesterday I was speaking to some of its inmates. One of them had nearly completed her own century of life, most of them had seen far more than the threescore years and ten which we call old age; but they come of a wonderful race, the men of fire and steel; the women of silent suffering—the old Huguenots of France. {9} WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE STRANGER.