"A decently-dressed woman calls at your house and begs for a shawl to protect a neighbor of hers from the cold when she goes out to her daily work. You have a shawl. You have laid it aside for this very purpose. Why not give it to her and have done with it? If you do not know the person who calls, it would be very injudicious to entrust to a stranger what you intended for a third person. It may be pawned for strong drink, or retained by one who is not in want. Better go or send and satisfy yourself that the need exists, and see that it is supplied. You wisely conclude to look for yourself. You find the object of your charity, and ascertain that she is a superior needle-woman, capable of earning her living, but not able to find work where there is none. If she could hire a room in some part of the city nearer the demand for work, she might succeed. You give her the shawl, and with it a few words of encouragement. In a day or two you are at a meeting of the directors of the Industrial Home or Orphans' Society, and allude to the case of this woman. A young lady present immediately recollects a poor woman, whom she has seen during the week, who has a room to rent, and perhaps it would exactly suit. The parties are brought together and the room is taken. Two wants are thus promptly supplied--the want of a _room_ and the want of a _tenant_. But how came the young lady to know of such a room? Why, simply by visiting the mother of one of her class in the Sunday-school. It was not any part of her plan to obtain any such information; nor could she have known that it might be of any advantage to her or to any one else for her to possess it. The indirect result of this simple visit accomplished--what? 1. It secured a tenant for a vacant room, and thus helped a poor woman to pay her rent. 2. It put another poor woman in a comfortable and convenient position to earn her own living. 3. It laid the mother of one of her Sunday-school children under great obligation to her, and thus increased her influence and her power to do good both to mother and child. It will take a strong force to sunder that tie. 4. It brought to the new tenant Christian care and sympathy, which she before lacked, and the way for her attendance on the stated means of grace." Thus is exemplified, by a single real and comparatively unimportant incident in humble life, the power of the Sunday-school machinery, in its legitimate movements, to improve and elevate social condition and character. It was all the work of that little wheel in our machinery called VISITING. XXI. SYSTEMATIC DISTRICT CHRISTIAN VISITATION. The plan here given in its present form grew out of an exigency in the operations of the Missionary Committee of the New York Sunday-School Union in the summer of 1856.