Howard Douglass arose to offer the dedicatory prayer after the preliminary exercises had passed. He prayed that the place where the building now stood might be redeemed, brought back, saved for God. Would his prayer be answered? Could Freetown be redeemed? The great audience was swayed by one feeling, and through the room, as the prayer went on, a breath of the divine Spirit swept, and all hearts present felt its beneficent benediction. CHAPTER VIII. FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER. _Mr. Alfred Harris, member of the Associated Press Bureau, to Walter R. Stoddard, editor of The Boston Message_:-- MERTON, FEB. 12, 1914. "_My Dear Stoddard_:--I was sent here, as you know, to write up the social settlement in Freetown; and I have done the best I could, and am ready to start West to-morrow. But I feel tempted to let you know something in this letter that I did not feel like putting into my report. "Merton is a city of about 50,000 people, a railroad centre, and a place of good residence and business life. "Fifteen years ago a district known as Freetown, settled by negroes, had the reputation of being the source of more crime and social trouble than any other part of the city. The son of one of the district court judges was found one night unconscious, wounded, and robbed in this district. It was supposed at the time that he was assaulted by a criminal by the name of Williams, who committed suicide while in jail. This was afterward proved to be false; as I shall speak of this later on, I will not go into the details of it here. "What I wanted to write about particularly was the personality of the social-settlement work now finally established in Freetown. "Rev. Howard Douglass and his church (the Emmanuel) proposed the building of a house in Freetown where some of the most prominent families in Merton agreed to live during all or part of the time, for the express purpose of redeeming the place from sin and fitting it up into a transformed human life. "It is not exaggerating the facts to say that what was planned fifteen years ago has been carried out with the most remarkable results. Let me tell you a little about them. "First, there was the building itself, built largely by the gifts of Mrs. Carlton, who had been a social leader in Merton for many years. Her original gift was three thousand dollars. She afterwards increased it to five thousand. The building contained a large kindergarten and assembly hall, a housekeeping department, a reading-room, a dispensary, a nursery, bath-rooms, and rooms for sewing and industrial work, and physical culture and music rooms. There have been some changes in the original plan of the house, but it has remained practically the same as when first built. I ought not to forget the rooms provided for residents who take up their stay in the house on a co-operative plan that has so far worked very satisfactorily.