I had been presenting the cause of our "boys" in prison at a drawing-room gathering in a company of the wealthy and fortunate, whose lives were very remote from need, suffering and hunger. I passed over the main branch of our work, to one that has grown out of it, and told of the dark, sad shadow that has fallen on many homes, bringing untold suffering to the helpless and innocent. After the meeting was over, a lady made her way to my side and clasping my hand she said very fervently, "I do thank you specially for one thought you have given me this evening. I have seen the outside of state prisons and have always regarded them as places full of evil-doers who justly deserve what they are suffering, and there with me the whole question has ended. I never for one moment realized that these men had wives and mothers and little children. Of course, if I had stopped to think, I would have seen that side of it, but I never gave the question a thought." I believe there are very many who, if they confessed the truth, would have to admit the same thing. This perhaps saddest side of the question hidden away in aching hearts and shadowed homes does not flaunt itself in the press, does not beg on our streets nor appeal to us through Christian publications as do the needs that can be classified. Yet the need is there and it is very real and urgent. If there are eighty-four thousand men to-day in our prisons, think what a vast number of sorrowing hearts must be bearing their suffering and shame in the outside world! I think my work has become doubly dear and sacred to me since I have realized that I could go to these "boys" as a messenger and representative of their mothers. Very grateful have I been for the name "Little Mother" which they have given me, for I feel that I go not to impress my own personality upon them, but to revive in them the sacred memories of the past and if possible, to help in bringing the answer to the many mothers' prayers that for so long have seemed fruitless of result. I once received a letter from one of the men in which he said, "Little Mother, as you talked to us on Sunday in the chapel it was not your voice I heard, but it seemed to me my mother spoke again from the long ago, and it was not your face I saw, but her face that came up before me as I had seen it in the days of my childhood:" This thought has meant a great deal to me and having come to feel how true this is of my ministry to many of the prisoners, I have found I could take to them a double message, first from their God and then from some loved one, the very mention of whom aroused all their better nature and awakened purer thoughts within their minds.