For two or three years, illness and decrepitude interfered with my active service, but the ideal was still enthroned in my heart; and, as health returned, the shame of doing nothing for others became intolerable. Return to activity was a very gradual process, and, if one had ever "despised the day of small things," one now learned to value it. When I came up to London, two or three of us, who had been undergraduate friends at Oxford, formed a little party for workhouse-visiting. One of the party has since been a Conservative Minister, one a Liberal Minister, and one a high official of the Central Conservative Association. Sisters joined their brothers, and we used to jog off together on Saturday afternoons to the Holborn Workhouse, which, if I remember right, stood in a poetically-named but prosaic-looking street called "Shepherdess Walk." The girls visited the women, and we the men. We used to take oranges and flowers to the wards, give short readings from amusing books, and gossip with the bedridden about the outside world. We always had the kindest of welcomes from our old friends; and great was their enthusiasm when they learned that two of their visitors had been returned to Parliament at the General Election of 1880. As one of the two was a Conservative and one a Liberal, the political susceptibilities of the ward were not offended, and we both received congratulations from all alike. One quaint incident is connected with these memories. Just outside the Workhouse was a sort of booth, or "lean-to," where a very respectable woman sold daffodils and wall-flowers, which we used to buy for our friends inside. One day, when one of the girls of our party was making her purchase, the flower-seller said, "Would your Ladyship like to go to the Lady Mayoress's Fancy Dress Ball? If so, I can send you and your brother tickets. You have been good customers to me, and I should be very glad if you would accept them." The explanation was that the flower-seller was sister to the Lady Mayoress, whom the Lord Mayor had married when he was in a humbler station. The tickets were gratefully accepted; and, when we asked the giver if she was going to the Ball, she replied, with excellent sense and taste, "Oh, no. My sister, in her position, is obliged to give these grand parties, but I should be quite out of place there. You must tell me all about it next time you come to the Workhouse." Meanwhile, during this "day of small things" a quiet but momentous revolution had been going on all round us, in the spheres of thought and conscience; and the earlier idea of individual service had been, not swamped by, but expanded into, the nobler conception of corporate endeavour.