They turned suddenly around the corner of a pleasant street, and as if they were among the shifting scenes of a panorama, the entire foreground had changed. Wretchedness! that word no more described the horrors of their surroundings than could any other that came to Dora's mind. The scene beggared description. "Swarms of horrors!" she called them in speaking of the people afterward. Just now she clung silent and half frightened to her husband's arm. He, too, became silent, and appeared occupied solely in guarding his wife and shielding her from disagreeable collisions. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation of delight: "Look, Dora! this is the building of which I have read but have never seen. I have not had time to come so far down before this. Can you imagine a more delightful oasis in this desert of filth and pollution?" There it stood, the great, _clean_, splendid building! towering above its vile and rickety neighbors. And in bright, clear letters, that seemed to Theodore to be written in diamonds, gleamed the name; far down the street it caught the eye, "Home for Little Wanderers." Dora looked and smiled and caught her breath, and then the tears dropped one by one on her husband's sleeve. It almost seemed like the voice of an angel speaking to the world from out of that moral darkness. "Oh, if I had known that day when I was in New York of such a spot as this in all the world, what a different world it would have looked to me. The idea that there could be a home _anywhere_ in all the universe, or beyond it, for such as I had never occurred to me." Theodore spoke in low, earnest tones, full of deep and solemn feeling. "But, Theodore," said Dora, gently, "if you _had_ known of this home, or any like it, and gone thither instead of to Cleveland on that day, where would you have been now, and what would have become of me?" Theodore smiled down on his fair young bride, and drew the hand that rested on his arm a little closer as he answered: "I am quite content, my darling. I am not complaining of the guiding Hand that led me home. I have surely reason to be utterly and entirely satisfied with my lot in life; but there are not many boys such as I was who find little blue-eyed maidens to bring precious little Bible cards to them, and so write lessons on their hearts that will tell for all time--yes, and for all eternity." "There are not many Dr. Birges and Mr. Stephenses," said Dora, emphatically. And Theodore's response was quite as emphatic: "Very few indeed! If there were only _more_. But, Dora, isn't it a grand enterprise? Let us go in. I have always intended to go through the mission; but, you see, I waited for _you_."