“It’s not work I’ll have child o’ mine do, long’s I’ve hands that’ll earn the bit an’ sup she’ll be takin’,” said another, and the children themselves, hollow-eyed and haggard, watched the fracas with small interest. The first who went out had to be compelled, as it were, to come in to the feast, but never again were like measures necessary. The good work went on with courage, even with glee. Baths, clean clothes, plenty to eat, sweet air and sunshine did their work, and the dirty, forlorn little wretches chosen in the beginning returned home, imploring for longer time, and with a new sense of life born in them. Season after season the same doors opened, and as the work grew, funds poured in; a method formulated itself, and the management became a model for all similar work elsewhere. This is what had happened at one point, but the germ was not a single one, and at another in the same state, another mind had felt the same touch, and the same result had come. The project had been talked over before it took positive form, and talked over with a woman, who, from the upper chamber where long years had held her prisoner to pain, looked out upon the world through others’ eyes, but with an insight that went to the heart of all possibilities for help. The young minister who counted her word as equivalent to the united force of a dozen elders, went home to his flock among the Pennsylvania mountains—hard-working farmers from whom quick response could hardly have been expected—and this is the letter he wrote on a Sunday when he had spoken to them his first word of the wish born a year before: “SHERMAN, PA., June 3, 1877. “MY DEAR MRS. L.:—The ball is set in motion. I took for my text this morning, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me,” and made the practical bearing of my words the bringing out into our homes some of the waifs and outcasts from the city. One man stopped on his way home to say that he would take four. In another house there is a call for a mother and a baby, and so on through the town. The enthusiasm and response of my people have delighted me. “Next to get the money; then to tell the children. Must not two weeks in this pure mountain air be felt by them in after life? It seems to me that they are all but here. “Now may I have the introduction you promised me to Dr. Eggleston? I shall try for a pass over the road to go back and forth with the children myself, and perhaps I can arrange with some of these good people on the way to bring us a country lunch as the train comes along. Some good angel whisper it in the ear of a little one! Tell a tired mother there is life for her child in this fresh country air. “WILLARD PARSONS.”