How long she read, how she was at first moved, none but God can know. But, whether from mental distress or from the sad vicissitudes of her needy career, she became very ill, and went to a public hospital. While there, she saw the sufferings of those who applied for its charity, and observed that the filthy state of their persons needed a friendly female hand. When she came out, she wrote to the missionary, and told him she wished to dedicate all her spare time to the lost and degraded of her own sex. "God's mercy," she writes, "has spared me from their fate: for me their misery will have no terrors. I will clean and wash them, and mend their linen. If they can get into a hospital, I will take care of their clothes." You may suppose the missionary did not lose sight of Marian, and you may guess how gladly she undertook to distribute Bibles; going, where none of the gentry could go, into dens of misery known only to the police-officers and herself. Spending her mornings in distributing Bibles, and giving the kind and pastoral counsel everywhere needed, she discovered, in the autumn of 1857, a new want, and devoted her afternoons to teaching the ignorant women about her to cut and make their children's clothes. Why _she_ knew better than _they_, who shall tell? Then came the November panic and its wide-spread distresses; and, seeing how food was wasted from ignorance, she opened a soup-kitchen of her own. She used what is called vegetable stock: her wretched customers liked it, and she sold it all through the winter for a price which just paid the cost of cooking. Her noble work goes on. The stone which the builders of our modern society would have rejected, is now the head of the corner; and Seven Dials knows her as "Marian, the Bible-woman." Another mission has been begun at St. Pancras, where, in one of the worst neighborhoods, the most profligate men have gathered together, between church hours, to hear a young lady read the "Pilgrim's Progress," and are thus softened and led to higher things. Would you shut those sacred lips because they are a woman's? Would you quote St. Paul to her, and blush for her career, if she were your own daughter? I will not believe it. At the parish of St. Alkmunds, in Shrewsbury, the wife of the clergyman, Mrs. Whitman, began by modest reading from house to house; a work which has since been greatly blessed. Gently she won profligate men and women to give up their beer, and the temptations of the "tap;" signing herself the pledge which they alone needed.