This discouraging incident brought to her feet, on the platform, a tall, thick-set, strong-featured woman. She spoke with a strident, energetic voice, a Bowery accent, and a manner to which all thought of shrinking or embarrassment was a stranger. It was Sister Maggie. She said, as nearly as I recall the words: “This teaching children beer-drinking is the beginning of all the deviltry. I was passing a dive yesterday and I saw a little kid come out with a pail of beer that she had been sent for, and no sooner was she outside the door than the pail went to her head. That’s the way I used to do, and learned to drink and steal at the same time. But God can help us to reclaim even beings so badly educated. He helped me, and there can’t be a worse case on the East Side. There is not a dive over there that I haven’t been drunk in. Brother S. knows how often I have drank with him at old C.’s dead-house (rum-shop). Sixteen years ago I was a leper, a confirmed sot. If you had seen me you would not have believed that I could have been saved. Christians said I was too far gone; they said there was not enough woman left in me to be saved. I had had the jim-jams twicet. [Laughter.] The first time I had ’em I thought my back hair was full of mice—oh, that was awful! [More laughter.] I was just getting over the tremens when I first come in here. I was a walking rag-shop, and if you’d a seen me you’d give me plenty of room on the walk. I staggered in and sat down on the very backest seat. Now they let me sit up here on the platform. What d’ye think of that? God helped me, and he has helped me now for sixteen years, and I am going through. I am happy. I have friends and good clothes, and more than all, I have _a good home_, and that is what I never knew before.” At the mention of the word “home,” all the woman’s instinct asserted itself, and for the first time her voice softened, and her manner melted; she sobbed, and sat down. I can give no complete idea of the effect of this, because the reader can know nothing of the surroundings, the antecedents of the speaker and of many of her listeners, and the keen rapport that ties them together. These worshipers are a class and an organization by themselves; they have no church affiliations, and their worship is _sui generis_; many of them were outcasts of society in former years, they stand alone since their reformation, and they are drawn close together in their isolation. True, there are many among them who were always respectable members of society; many who since their conversion here have joined churches; there are richly dressed and cultured-looking people scattered in these audiences; but the fact remains that the genius and distinctive _personnel_ of the meetings are of the order of which Jerry McAuley and “Sister Maggie” and their ministrations are representatives.