I went to my own room, feeling still like the prodigal, and that I had somehow gotten back home. But I had a deeper and more novel feeling. A new light had come to me, faintly, but still a light. What had I ever done except for myself? Here were two men equally as poor as I, living the life of self-denial--one actually by choice, the other as willingly and uncomplainingly as though it were by choice, and both not only content, but happy. Why should not I enter the brotherhood? Here was something far higher and nobler than anything I had ever contemplated taking part in. What was it that withheld me? Was it, I questioned myself, that I, with no association whatever in the town except the poor, yet belonged to the class that Wolffert crusaded against? Was there something fundamentally wrong with society? I could not enter freely into Wolffert's rhapsody of hate for the oppressors, nor yet into John Marvel's quiet, deep, and unreasoning love of Mankind. Yet I began to see dimly things I had never had a glimmer of before. The association with my old friends made life a wholly different thing for me, and I made through them many new friends. They were very poor and did not count for much in the world; but they were real people, and their life, simple and insignificant as it was, was real and without sham. I found, indeed, that one got much nearer to the poor than to the better class--their life was more natural; small things matter so much more to them. In fact, the smallest thing may be a great thing to a poor man. Also I found a kindness and generosity quite out of proportion to that of the well-to-do. However poor and destitute a man or a family might be there was always some one poorer and more destitute, and they gave with a generosity that was liberality, indeed. For they gave of their penury what was their living. Whatever the organized charities may do, and they do much, the poor support the poor and they rely on each other to an extent unknown among their more fortunate fellow-citizens. As the Egyptian always stops to lift another's load, so here I found men always turning in to lend their aid. Thus, gradually in the association of my friends who were working among the poor and helping to carry their burdens, I began to find a new field and to reap in it a content to which I had long been a stranger. Also life began to take on for me a wholly new significance; as a field of work in which a man might escape from the slavery of a selfish convention which cramped the soul, into a larger life where service to mankind was the same with service to God, a life where forms were of small import and where the Christian and the Jew worked shoulder to shoulder and walked hand in hand. How much of my new feeling was due to Miss Eleanor Leigh, I did not take the trouble to consider. "Father," said Eleanor, that evening, "I have a poor man whom I want a place for, and I must have it."