But magnificent as this sounds, and _is_ (for there can be no doubt about it that our friend is a very fine fellow), still there are flaws both in his past and present constitution and character which make his work less effective than it otherwise might be. Briefly, his heart is not large enough for his body--his circulation is slow--his movements are ponderous--and, being slightly hard of hearing, he does not take in things until some little time after other people have done so. Then, too, he is somewhat a creature of habit; his mind does not readily assimilate new ideas, and he does rather an unusual number of things because ‘he always has done so.’ His _raison d’être_, his whole work, is founded on the first word of his name--Charity--(which the new translators tell us we may call love, if we like), and yet he is sometimes curiously persistent in ‘thinking evil,’ and he hardly, I fear, ‘hopeth all things,’ nor yet lives up to his standard of ‘never failing’; or what does 463 cases thrown aside as ‘undeserving and ineligible’ mean in this last month’s returns of work? Then he has an odd way of talking about his work. I have often seen ordinary, commonplace, every-day sort of people begin to listen to him with keen interest, but gradually drop eyelids and lose sympathy as he threads his way through investigations, organisations, registrations, co-operations, applications, administrations, each and all done by multiplication! This is a pity, for of course the every-day sort of people are most wanted to help him. He cannot only work with people who have been cradled in blue-books and nourished with statistics, nor yet with those who are like the man who ‘did not care to look unless he could see the future.’ Some people dislike this faulty creature very much. They see no good in him, and call him all sorts of hard names; but then one is apt to find faults in large people more unbearable than in little ones. Clumsy people, if big, are so very clumsy; they tumble over the furniture, and kick the pet dog, and if they do chance to tread on toes it hurts so very much! and that is partly the case with him. But he has virtues, and plenty of them; he is not afraid of work, and he really cares for the poor; he is exceedingly honourable about money; he is methodical and business-like; he is thorough in all he does, thinking no detail beneath his notice; he is accurate about his facts and moderate in his statements; he is most even in his temper (though personally I should like him better if I could once see him in a rage), and he is patient and painstaking; he is humble, though conceited, too; that is, with the sort of conceit that one sometimes meets with in swimmers who know that they do the stroke ‘quite perfectly’ but yet are somewhat afraid of deep water; fearful, not of their breath or strength failing, but of the cramp, or jelly-fish, or other unknown dangers of the deep.