Rhoda stood in silence listening to the strange man till she ceased to hear him, and looking at him till she ceased to see him! Another Presence and another Voice was there. _It was the Christ_. Rhoda was delivered. She is still fighting for souls, and loves most to do it where Satan's seat is. But the knife-grinder never knew. II. _A Kiss_. The heat and smell in the narrow slum were worse than usual. A hot Saturday night in midsummer is a bad time in the slums, and worse in the slum public-houses. It was so on the night I speak of. In and out of the suffocating bar the dirty stream of humanity came and went. Men who had ceased long ago to be anything but beasts; women with tiny, white children in their bony arms; boys and girls sipping the naphtha of perdition, and talking the talk of fools; lewd and foul-mouthed women of the streets, all hustled and jostled one another, and sang, and swore, and bandied horrid words with the barmen--and, all the while, they drank, and drank, and drank! The atmosphere grew thicker and thicker with the dust and tobacco-smoke, and little by little the flaming gas-jets burnt up the oxygen, till by midnight the place was all but unendurable. Among the last to go was a woman of the town, who betook herself, with a bottle of whisky, to a low lodging-house hard by. There she drank and quarrelled with such vehemence that in the early hours of the morning the "Deputy"--as the guardian of order is called in these houses--picked her up and threw her into the gutter outside. There, amid the garbage from the coster-mongers' barrows and the refuse of the town, this remnant of a ruined woman lay in a half-drunken doze, until the golden sunlight mounted over the city houses and pierced the sultry gloom on the Sabbath morning. Another woman chanced that way. Young, beautiful alike in form and spirit, and touched with the far-offness of many who walk with Christ, she hastened to the early Sunday morning service, there to join her prayers with others seeking strength to win the souls of men. "What is that?" she asked her friend as they passed. "That," replied the other, "is a drunken woman, unclean and outcast." In a moment the Salvationist knelt upon the stones, and kissed the battered face of the poor wanderer. "Who is that--what did you do?" said the Magdalene. "Why did you kiss me? _Nobody ever kissed me since my mother died_." _It was the Christ_. That kiss won a heart to Him. III. _A Promotion_. Henry James was coming rapidly into his employer's favour. Thoughtful, obliging, attentive to details, anxious to please, and, above all, thoroughly reliable in word and deed, he was a first-class servant and an exemplary Salvationist. In the Corps to which he belonged he stood high in the esteem both of the Local Officers and the Soldiers, and there was no more welcome speaker in the Open-air or more successful "fisher" in the sinners' meetings than "Young James."