_4th Case._--"I am the daughter of a minister of the gospel; and I pledge my word solemnly and sacredly, that it was the low price paid for my labor that drove me to sin. I could only make thirty-four cents a week at shirts, and should have starved but for the street. At last, I swore to myself that I would keep from it for my boy's sake. I had pawned my clothes, and slept in a shawl and petticoat under a butcher's shed. I was trying to get to the workhouse. I had had no food for two days. My baby's legs froze to my side, and I sank upon a doorstep. A lady found us, and would have fed us; but I could not eat. She rubbed the baby's legs with brandy. That night I got to the workhouse: but they would not take me in without an order; so I went back to sin for one month. It was the last. In my heart I hated it; my whole nature rebelled at it; and nobody but God knows how I struggled to give it up. I pawned my only gown more than once." Look at the frightful calmness of this story: "They would not admit me to the workhouse without an order; _so I went back to sin for one month_." When this girl told her story to Mr. Mayhew, she had been eight years at service, honored by her employers. Her personal beauty was so great, and the whole story so romantic, that Mr. Mayhew could hardly believe that she had come to him of her own accord to save other women from the same fate; and he took a day's journey into the country to confirm the facts. Her employers spoke in high terms of her honesty, sobriety, industry, and modesty. For her child's sake, she begged him to conceal her name; and she told her story with her face hidden in her hands, sobbing so as scarcely to be understood, and the tears dropping through. If you do not realize the commonness of these tragedies, may God help you! Some of you will assert that all this is necessary; that, in this age, a certain proportion of women must meet this fate; and wall me up with statistics. I tell you to bring the battering-ram of a Divine Love to bear on that wall. You will find, then, that, just as much as it was decreed that such women should be, it was decreed that an infinite saving power should exist, and that you should help to make it available. You may make these statistics what you will, not in an hour or a day, but in _time_. Some of you will assert that women capable of falling thus can hardly be worth saving. I know there is some wilful vice; I do not desire to blink the truth: but, among those whom ill-paid labor forces into sin, there are women nobler and more disinterested than many who remain pure. Look at the stories I have told you,--women working for their kindred; a young girl of seventeen ruined to find bread for a crippled sister. In New York, the thirty-seven women supporting infirm parents; twenty-nine providing for nephews and nieces; twenty-three, widows with the care of young children.