The young and inexperienced man gazed with a strange expression at his new and humble teacher. This was better preaching than he had ever heard or practised. His heart had been misled, but not thoroughly vitiated, by a selfish and falsely styled "respectable" education. He was too much affected to prolong the conversation then; but he became, from that time, a pupil at the feet of the aged Dorothy. His fine manners were laid aside. He became a real pastor. He was, from that day, more frequently in the cottages of the poor, twenty times over, than in the houses of the rich. He distributed of his substance to relieve the wants of others, and lived himself upon little. He forgot creeds to preach goodness, and pity, and mercy, and love. He preached till he wept, and his audiences wept with him. His life was an embodiment of the virtues he inculcated. And when, in the course of five short years, he laid down his body in the grave, a victim to the earnest conviction of his mind, the poor crowded around his hallowed resting-place with streaming eyes, and loving, but afflicted hearts, wishing they might be where he was when they died, since they were sure his presence, they said, of itself would make a heaven! The young clergyman interred Dorothy Pyecroft but half a year before his own departure; and her last words were words of thankfulness that ever she had shown the young man the fallacy of the proverb—"Charity begins at home." THE MINISTER OF MERCY. Leicester has the appearance of a new town as you glance at it, in your rapid course on the Midland Counties Railway. And, if the "locomotives" halt for a few minutes at a point on the line where you have a full view of the goodly borough, the momentary impression which numerous ancient church-towers gives you of the real antiquity of the place is soon effaced by the extensive rows of newly-built houses that stretch away on every side till they appear to cover almost the entire populous area on which you are gazing. Successive gusts of prosperity for the manufacturers, occurring at various periods during the last forty years,—too often followed by severe depressions,—have in fact swelled the town to more than double its size at the close of the last century.