Page:The One Woman (1903).pdf/29

 "I can!" cried a man, who rose trembling with deep feeling.

His high, well-moulded forehead showed the heritage of intellectual power. His eyes, soft and tender as a woman's, had in their depths the record of a great sorrow.

Taking his watch out of his pocket, he looked at it a moment, and, as the tears began to steal down his face, spoke in a tremulous voice.

"Seven years, four months, three days and six hours ago the Spirit of God came to my poor lost soul and found it in a dirty saloon on the East Side. I was dead—dead to shame, dead to honour, dead to love, dead to the memory of life. I was so low I found scant welcome in hell's own port, the saloon. They knew me and dreaded to see me. I had served time in prison, and when I drank I was an ugly customer for the bravest policeman to meet alone.

"Ragged, dirty, blear-eyed, besotted, I was seated on a whisky barrel wondering how I could beat the barkeeper out of a drink, when a sweet-faced boy came up and handed me a card of this church's services.

"I don't know how it happened, but all of a sudden it came over me—where I was, and what I was, and what I once had been—a boy with a face like that, with a Christian father and mother who loved me as their own life, and then how I had gone