The next morning, the sweet winds of his childhood wooing him to remain yet a day among their fields, he sat on the top of the Aberdeen coach, on his way back to the horrors of court and alley in the terrible London. CHAPTER VII. THE SILK-WEAVER. When he arrived he made it his first business to find 'Widow Walker.' She was evidently one of the worst of her class; and could it have been accomplished without scandal, and without interfering with the quietness upon which he believed that the true effect of his labours in a large measure depended, he would not have scrupled simply to carry off the child. With much difficulty, for the woman was suspicious, he contrived to see her, and was at once reminded of the child he had seen in the cart on the occasion of Shargar's recognition of his mother. He fancied he saw in her some resemblance to his friend Shargar. The affair ended in his paying the woman a hundred and fifty pounds to give up the girl. Within six months she had drunk herself to death. He took little Nancy Kennedy home with him, and gave her in charge to his housekeeper. She cried a good deal at first, and wanted to go back to Mother Walker, but he had no great trouble with her after a time. She began to take a share in the house-work, and at length to wait upon him. Then Falconer began to see that he must cultivate relations with other people in order to enlarge his means of helping the poor. He nowise abandoned his conviction that whatever good he sought to do or lent himself to aid must be effected entirely by individual influence. He had little faith in societies, regarding them chiefly as a wretched substitute, just better than nothing, for that help which the neighbour is to give to his neighbour. Finding how the unbelief of the best of the poor is occasioned by hopelessness in privation, and the sufferings of those dear to them, he was confident that only the personal communion of friendship could make it possible for them to believe in God. Christians must be in the world as He was in the world; and in proportion as the truth radiated from them, the world would be able to believe in Him. Money he saw to be worse than useless, except as a gracious outcome of human feelings and brotherly love. He always insisted that the Saviour healed only those on whom his humanity had laid hold; that he demanded faith of them in order to make them regard him, that so his personal being might enter into their hearts. Healing without faith in its source would have done them harm instead of good--would have been to them a windfall, not a Godsend; at best the gift of magic, even sometimes the power of Satan casting out Satan. But he must not therefore act as if he were the only one who could render this individual aid, or as if men influencing the poor individually could not aid each other in their individual labours. He soon found, I say, that there were things he could not do without help, and Nancy was his first perplexity. From this