"In another court we found a silk-weaver hard at work,--from eight in the morning to eleven at night. This man, a Christian, had formerly been a weaver of velvet, but finding that a living could not in any way be made out of it, in an evil hour he was tempted to go into a skittle-alley as a helper. Here, though receiving good wages, he found he could not be happy,--could not 'abide with God;' so he gave it up, and now he is earning barely tenpence a day; but hard as his lot is, he is happy in the consciousness of doing right, and still manages to spare a little time to take his reading-lesson from the Bible, and to tend a flowering-plant, his only companion, which representative of the vegetable world seems to have nearly as hard a struggle to live as its master. "Our next visit was to a poor old woman between sixty and seventy years of age, surrounded with every discomfort, and troubled with constant cough and weakness. Apparently she had only a few days to live, but she was able to rejoice in Jesus as her Saviour, whose presence even then made all things bright. "The next visit was to a poor dying girl; in a room so small that there was only a margin of about three feet round two sides of the bed for standing ground, the floor covered with rags, (her mother being a rag-mender), lay one, who, though poor and miserable, was yet an heir of glory, and was upheld in all her wretchedness by Him who was sent to be 'the Comforter.' We thanked God for these two bright spots, where divine light and love were seen and felt. "At the Home of Industry we had been invited to take tea with two hundred and fifty destitute widows. The testimony of one of these, a clean, tidy old woman, was very precious. She had once been in affluent circumstances and drove her carriage; her fortune lost in one day, she was now reduced to poverty, but, 'Sir,' she said, 'I would not go back to it all and be as I then was; no, not for all the world.' Possessing Christ as her own, she felt she had the riches of God, and knew that there was an inheritance reserved for her in heaven, incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away." The great lifework of Miss Macpherson and her devoted family may be said to have begun this year. The need of emigration may be expressed in her own words:-- "Boys came to us for shelter instead of going to empty barrels, railway arches, and stairways. We found they were grateful for all that was done for them. The simple gospel lesson was our lever to lift them into new thoughts and desires. The sharp dividing knife of the Word of God would discover the thief and liar, and rouse the conscience to confession more than anything beside. But our walls had limits, and our failures in finding employment for many away from their old haunts became a great difficulty, and the God-opened way of emigration to Canada was pressed upon us."