One day she told these people that she was a Salvation Army lassie. The Army was hated in this district because it was trying to close the saloons; only a few months earlier its preachers had been stoned in the streets. The “White Angel,” herself, had been warned by the police that it would be dangerous for her to speak in this part of London. Yet so beloved and respected had she become that she felt perfectly safe. Because of her good work, the people in this poverty-stricken and wicked district were soon attending the meetings of the Army. The girl who dared to go into the very worst part of London to live the life of its poor people that she might better know how to help them was Evangeline Booth. In later years she became the Commander-in-chief of the Salvation Army in the United States. Evangeline Booth’s father, William Booth, had been apprenticed as a boy to a pawnbroker. He was so touched by the poverty and wickedness around him that he put his whole soul into helping others to lead better lives. The Mission, that he established in London after many struggles, became in time the Salvation Army. For years, William Booth, General of the Army, toiled against odds of every kind. The thinking world now has respect and admiration for the splendid work that the Salvation Army carries on. In those days, however, the street preachers of the Army were as likely to be showered with stones and bricks as to be sneered and ridiculed. The rougher people disliked the Army because it was fighting drink and wickedness. Other people could not see that the drum and tambourine and simple prayers might help to turn a man’s heart to God as readily as could organ music and learned sermons. It was into the home of the founder of this once despised organization, at Hackney, a suburb of London, that a seventh child, Evangeline Booth, was born, December 1865. There was a loving welcome for the little girl, though she had come into a home where both mother and father believed that their family must be second to the work that they were doing for the world. Little Evangeline and her sisters heard so much of their father’s work that even their favorite game was playing prayer meeting with their battered dolls. She and the others had very few toys, because their parents thought that the money should be spent for the poor. It was a very busy home in which Eva, as her father preferred to call her, grew up. The bell was always ringing. Messengers were coming and going. In one room her father’s deep voice might be heard planning his work. In another room her mother was busy writing for the Cause. The younger children murmured their lessons in a third room, and in a fourth, one of the older girls practiced on the piano.