Edward E. Hale regards the ministry as the most practical business in the world. The theory that the minister spends his mornings reading Hebrew, and his afternoons praying with dying old women, is exploded in his career. He knocks about in the most active of city life. It came out that the day before I called he went up to the State House to argue in favor of an honest bill of some kind. He then signed the lease of the "Noonday Rest," a club where working girls are to get good food. He made himself responsible for fifteen hundred dollars a year because the poor girls had to be cared for, and he "knew it would come back to him all right." Then the duties of Vice-President of the Industrial Aid called for his attention. "I am the man of business," he said, with flashing eyes. Of such are the charities of his life. Even while the writer was sitting in the chair that Dean Stanley occupied, and revolving the problem whether Doctor Hale summoned from some other planet the time in which to write his sermons, we were interrupted by a messenger from the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who came for about fifty pounds of stories which Doctor Hale had read in order to determine the four winners of prizes. "I was a little taken in," he said, with a boyish laugh, after the messenger, stunned dumb by that kindly reception of Doctor Hale's (which is denied to no one), had departed staggering; "I thought they were to be short stories, and they turned out to be sixty-thousand-word books." Doctor Hale's study, which he calls his office, was once used as the school-room for day scholars, and had a piazza, on one side of it. This Mr. Hale has boarded up and uses the space--three feet wide--for his thousands of pamphlets. I stepped in there while the messenger from the society with the long name was occupying our host's attention, and, for all the world, it seemed like a touch from Dickens or a section from the Athenaeum. That pamphlet alcove, narrow, musty, yet busy, a composite of the stage-coach days and our electric era, gave me a graver suspicion of Doctor Hale's cosmopolitan interests than any word he had uttered or anything I had hitherto seen in the temple. When I came back Doctor Hale was again stretched upon the lounge. He began almost fiercely upon his favorite topic, and I can do no better than to give his own words: "I have written twenty-five books, but I'm not an author; I'm a parish minister. I don't care a snap for the difference between Balzac and Daudet. That isn't important in life. I do care about the difference between the classes of men who migrate to this country of mine." Here I interrupted him: "Is it better to do twenty things than one?"