After all is said, the religion of humanity comes nearest to our hearts. We need no towering church spires, nor cold stone walls to make our place of worship a secluded spot. The world is our book, and humanity our altar, on which we may lay our white rose of love and our pale lily of charity, and reach out to the Great Jehovah, through the responsive heart-throbs of our friends and neighbors. THE HOBO’S STORY Looking down the new road that leads up to the church and my own humble home, my wife and I saw a strange man approaching. We thought he was deformed at first glance, for he seemed to be out of proportion in many ways. As he drew nearer the window we noticed that he wore three or more coats, and the same number of inseparable pants—at least each pair was inseparable. At the church he hesitated, glancing at the parsonage, and then back to our back door. He was rather an old man, past sixty, judging from his hair and whiskers. At last he decided to try our house. I did not ask him, but I suspect that he mistook our house for the Methodist parsonage, since the church and our house are painted the same colors. I went to the door myself, and when he asked, “Could you give a hungry man something to eat?” I replied by inviting him inside and giving him a chair. “Traveling?” I inquired, not from idle curiosity, but to start a conversation and make the stranger feel that I took an interest in him. “A little,” he replied, “I came down from Erie last night on a freight train, and I ’most froze to death. No work up that way, except in the coke regions, and there they have Poles and Slavs and Finlanders and Hitalians and niggers.” I knew he was English by the way he pronounced Italian. “Did you use to work at the coke ovens?” I asked. “No, but I use to work in the hard coal mines—at Nanticoke and Shamokin; knocked off thirteen years ago, when the foreigners cut down wages. It was at Nanticoke I had the narrow escape with my life. I’ll tell you while I’m getting warmed up. It was all the mistake of the engineer. We were putting a tunnel from the new drifts up into the old abandoned workings, in order to drain the old workings down into the lower level, and then pump it out through the great pump that was pumping out the lower level.