It was with no peculiar pleasure therefore that I rose to receive this fresh "layman from the West"; but a single glance was enough to show me that my visitor was a man of very different stamp from his predecessors. There was something in the tall, manly figure, the bright smile, the frank winning address of Edward Denison that inspired confidence in a moment. "I come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted at "theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's Place," where he thought there was a great deal to be learned. In five minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable; but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability. Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter. Drunken sailors and Lascars from the docks rolled along shouting to its houses of ill-fame. There was little crime, though one of the "ladies" of the alley was a well-known receiver of stolen goods, but there was a good deal of drunkenness and vice. Now and then a wife came plumping on to the pavement from a window overhead; sometimes a couple of viragoes fought out their quarrel "on the stones"; boys idled about in the sunshine in training to be pickpockets; miserable girls flaunted in dirty ribbons at nightfall at half-a-dozen doors. But with all this the place was popular with even respectable working people in consequence of the small size and cheapness of the houses--for there is nothing the poor like so much as a house to themselves; and the bulk of its population consisted of casual labourers, who gathered every morning round the great gates of the docks, waiting to be "called in" as the ships came up to unload. The place was naturally unhealthy, constantly haunted by fever, and had furnished some hundred cases in the last visitation of cholera. The work done among them in the "cholera time" had never been forgotten by the people, and, ill-famed as the place was, I visited it at all times of the day and night with perfect security. The apostle however of John's Place was my friend the letter-sorter. He had fixed on it as his special domain, and with a little aid from others had opened a Sunday-school and simple Sunday services in the heart of it. A branch of the Women's Mission was established in the same spot, and soon women were "putting by" their pence and sewing quietly round the lady superintendent as she read to them the stories of the Gospels.