It must indeed have been a most curious establishment at Stepney Green! Comfort, as ordinary people know it, appears to have been entirely absent. The strangest characters foregathered there, all day and all night the place hummed like a hive. Mr. Charrington, as will be seen later, has always had a fondness for strange pets. In the house at Stepney a monkey was added to the _entourage_, and shortly afterwards a well-known Evangelistic preacher, who must also, I beg leave to think, have been a considerable prig, called at the "Monastery." Mr. Charrington, who was smoking his inevitable pipe, introduced this person to the monkey. The Evangelist threw back his head, rolled his eyes upwards, and lifted his hands. "Not very spiritual, Charrington," he said, "not very spiritual!" "I wonder if your tom-cat is very spiritual?" was Mr. Charrington's retort. Mr. Mowll, who is now vicar of Christ Church, Brixton, a college friend of Keith Falconer, who frequently visited the house at Stepney Green, always went to bed very late indeed. One night he rigged up a figure of a man with cushions and an overcoat, put a hat on its head and a pipe in its mouth, and then went to bed, leaving all the gas burning. The next morning, when the housekeeper went into the room to dust it, the poor thing was frightened out of her life to find, as she thought, a strange man sitting there in the full glare of the gas. She was so upset that Mr. Mowll, a most ardent Temperance reformer, was perhaps rightly punished by having to fetch the old lady some brandy from the nearest public-house. These incidents are all trivial enough, but I give them as illustrating the happy and boyish natures of the young men who found themselves together under the leadership of Mr. Charrington. When the bathroom tap was left on, and the whole house was flooded, their equanimity was not disturbed. When there was no proper dinner, they ate bread and cheese. The vagaries of the housekeeper, the odd behaviour of the monkey, were all subjects for mirth. The moral of this sort of life is obvious enough. These men cared nothing for personal comfort or pleasure. Their life was lived in an unceasing warfare with the powers of evil. Their swords were always girded on--the rest was as nothing. The late Earl of Kintore stayed for some little time at the East End house, and, as it unhappily turned out, just before his death. As he was leaving after his visit he shook his host's old housekeeper--whose name was Mrs. Pilgrim--by the hand and said, "Well, good-bye. You're a pilgrim and I'm a stranger, and we shall soon be at home." As a matter of fact the earl died suddenly only a fortnight afterwards. I continue the record of the early beginnings of the great work that was to come, for it was now that the East End Conference Hall first came into being.