Thomas Wright, of Manchester, is a worn but not a weary man of sixty-three, who has for forty-seven years been weekly servant in a large iron foundry, of which he is now the foreman. His daily work begins at five o'clock in the morning, and closes at six in the evening; for forty-seven years he has worked through twelve hours daily, to support himself and those depending on him. Those depending on him are not few; he has had nineteen children; and at some periods there have been grandchildren looking to him for bread. His income never has attained two hundred pounds a year. This is a life of toil. Exeter Hall might plead for him as a man taxed beyond the standard limit; but he had bread to earn, and knew that he had need to work for it: he did work with great zeal and great efficiency, obtaining very high respect and confidence from his employers. A man so laboring, and leading in his home an exemplary, pious life, might be entitled to go to bed betimes, and rest in peace between these days of industry and natural fatigue. What could a man do, in the little leisure left by so much unremitting work? Poor as he was--toiling as he did, a modest man of humble origin, with no power in the world to aid him but the wonderful spiritual power of an earnest will--Thomas Wright has found means, in his little intervals of leisure, to lead back, with a gentle hand, three hundred convicted criminals to virtue; to wipe the blot from their names and the blight from their prospects; to place them in honest homes, supported by an honest livelihood. Fourteen years ago Mr. Wright visited, one Sunday, the New Bailey Prison, at Manchester, and took an earnest interest in what he saw. He knew that, with the stain of jail upon them, the unhappy prisoners, after release, would seek in vain for occupation; and that society would shut the door of reformation on them, and compel them, if they would not starve, to walk on in the ways of crime. The jail-mark branding them as dangerous, men buttoned up their pockets when they pleaded for a second trial of their honesty, and left them helpless. Then, Thomas Wright resolved, in his own honest heart, that he would visit in the prisons, and become a friend to those who had no helper.