Its inception had been an accident. Two men who had first met as Pyncheon and I had first met had lost sight of each other for several years. At a time when each had worked his salvation out they had come together by accident on Broadway, and later had by another accident become responsible for a third. Finding him one night lying on the pavement of a lonely street, they had seemingly had no choice but to pick him up and carry him to a cheap but friendly hostelry which they knew would not refuse him. Here they had kept him till he had sobered up and taken the job they found for him. Watching over him for months, they finally had the pleasure of restoring him to his wife and seeing a broken home put on its feet again. This third man, in gratitude for what had been done for him, went after a fourth, and the fourth after a fifth, and so the chain was flung out. By the time their number had increased to some twenty-five or thirty Providence offered them a dwelling-place. The dwelling-place, with the few apparently worthless articles it contained, was all the club had ever accepted as a gift. Even that might have been declined had it not been for the fact that it was going begging. When old Miss Smedley died it was found that she had left her residence in Vandiver Place as a legacy to St. David’s Church, across the way. She had left it, however, as an empty residence. As an empty residence it was in a measure a white elephant on the hands of a legatee that had no immediate use for it. St. David’s Church, you will remember, was not now the fashionable house of prayer it had been in its early days. Time was when Vandiver Place was the heart of exclusive New York. In the ’forties and ’fifties no section of the city had been more select. In the ’sixties and ’seventies, when Doctor Grace was rector of St. David’s, it had become time-honored. In the ’eighties and ’nineties the old families began to move up-town and the boarding-houses to creep in; and in the early years of the twentieth century the residents ceded the ground entirely to the manufacturer of artificial flowers and the tailor of the ready-to-wear. In 1911 the line of houses that made it a cul-de-sac was torn down and a broad thoroughfare cut through a congeries of slums, the whole being named Vandiver Street. Vandiver Place was gone; and with it went Miss Smedley. Rufus Legrand, who succeeded Doctor Grace as rector of St. David’s, offered Miss Smedley’s house as a home for the Down and Out; but it was Beady Lamont, a husky furniture-mover and ardent member of the club, who suggested this philanthropic opportunity to Rufus Legrand. “Say, reverent, my buddy’s give in at last, on’y I haven’t got no place to put him. But, say, reverent, there’s that old house I helped to move the sticks out of two or three months ago. There’s three beds left in it, and a couple of chairs. Me and him could bunk there for a few nights, while he got straightened out, and—” “But you’d have no bedclothes.”