ministers and magistrates, and ladies and gentlemen, to run in the streets, had, like a good shepherd, gathered in the wretched outcasts; how he had brought them to God and the world; and how, while earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, he had rescued from misery, and saved to society, not less than five hundred of these children."[51] [51] "Anecdotes and Stories," by Rev. Thomas Guthrie, D.D. London: Houlston & Wright, pp. 156, 157. The biography of some of the best and most useful men the world has known may be written almost in a sentence. In the Old Testament there is a biography of this kind in the words, "And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him."[52] In the New Testament there is another of a similar character in the brief sentence, "There was a certain man in Cæsarea called Cornelius, a centurion of the band called the Italian _band_, a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, who gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway."[53] The life-story of John Pounds is told in the last sentence of Dr. Guthrie's narrative; yet a few farther details of the life and work of this noble-hearted man will be read with interest by all who venerate true worth and take pleasure in contemplating acts of Christ-like charity and mercy. [52] Gen. 5: 24. [53] Acts, 10: 1, 2. John Pounds was born at Portsmouth on the 17th of June, 1766. He was only twelve years old when his father, a sawyer employed in the government dockyard, had him bound apprentice as a shipwright in the same yard. He was then a strong active boy, and worked with his father in the yard until an accident maimed him for life, and made him incapable of working as a shipwright. He fell into a dry-dock and broke one of his thigh-bones, at the same time dislocating the joint. Whether the fracture was neglected or not we do not know; but, from some cause or other, poor Pounds went lame ever after. From the art of making ships he was now fain to turn to that of making shoes, and finding an old man in High Street, Portsmouth, who was willing to give the needful instruction, John Pounds, at the age of fifteen, became a _shoemaker_. Indeed, he would scarcely have claimed that title of dignity for himself; for his chief thoughts were given to other affairs, so that he was never an adept at his craft, and would in all probability have preferred to be set down as "only a cobbler." It was not until 1804, when Pounds was thirty-eight years of age, that "he ventured to become a tenant on his own account of the small, weather-boarded tenement in St. Mary's Street." It was in this humble abode that John Pounds lived and worked and carried on his benevolent labors for thirty-five years. The room appears to have been about the size and shape of an open third-class railway carriage, and the entire tenement had more the appearance of a shanty or hut than an ordinary dwelling-house. Yet it