have given them Whoever prayed

of temptation. Working on, making two or three dollars a week. At fifteen years of age sixty years old in sin. Pitching pennies at the street corners. Smoking fragments of castaway cigars. Tempted by the gamblers. Destroyed by the top gallery in the low play house. Blacking shoes their regular business. Between times blackening their morals. "Shine your boots, sir?" they call out with merry voices, but there is a tremor in their accentuation. Who cares for them? You put your foot thoughtlessly on their stand, and you whistled or smoked, when God knows you might one kind word. They never had one. for a bootblack? Who, finding the wind blowing under the short jacket, or reddening his bare neck, ever asked him to warm? Who, when he is wronged out of his ten cents, demands justice for him? God have mercy on the bootblacks. The newsboys, another regiment—the smartest boys in all the city. At work at four o'clock in the morning. At half-past three, by unnatural vigilance, awake themselves, or pulled at by rough hands. In the dawn of the day standing before the folding-rooms of the great newspapers, taking the wet, damp sheets over their arms, and against their chests already shivering with the cold. Around the bleak ferries, and up and down the streets on the cold days, singing as merrily as though it were a Christmas carol; making half a cent on each paper, some of them working fourteen hours for fifty cents! Nine thousand of these newsboys applied for aid at the Newsboys' Lodging-house on Park place, New York, in one year. About one thousand of them laid up in the savings bank connected with that institution, a little more than $3,000. But still this great army marches on, hungry, cold, sick, toward an early grave, or a quick prison. I tell you there is nothing

that so moves my compassion as on a cold winter morning to see one of these newsboys, a fourth clad, newspapers on his arm that he cannot seem to sell, face or hands bleeding from a fall, or rubbing his knee to relieve it from having been hit on the side of a car, as some "gentleman," with furs around his neck and gauntlets lined with lamb's wool, shoved him off, saying: "You miserable rat!" Yet hawking the papers through the streets, papers full of railroad accidents and factory explosions, and steamers foundering at sea in the last storm, yet saying nothing, and that which is to him worse than all the other calamities and all the other disasters, the calamity that he was ever born at all. Flash the police lantern around, and let us see these poor lads cuddled up under the stairway. Look at them! Now for a little while they are unconscious of all their pains and aches, and of the storm and darkness, once in awhile struggling in their dreams as though some one were trying to take the papers away from them. Standing there I wondered if it would be right to wish that they might never wake up. God pity them! There are other regiments in this reserve corps-regiments of rag-pickers, regiments of match-sellers, regiments of juvenile vagrants. Oh! if these lads are not saved, what is to become of our cities?

But I said to the detective, "I have had enough of this -night; let us go." But by that time I had lost the points of the compass, for we had gone down stairways and up stairways, and wandered down through this street and that street, and all I knew was that I was bounded on the north by want, and on the south by squalor, and on the east by crime, and on the west by despair. The fact was that everything had opened before us; for these detectives pretended to be searching for a thief, and they took me along as the man who had lost the property!

The stratagem was theirs, not mine. But I thought coming home that rainy night, I wished I could make ass before my congregation, as in a panorama, all that cene of suffering, that I might stir their pity and arouse heir beneficence, and make them the everlasting friends of city evangelization. "Why," you say, "I had no dea things were so bad. Why, I get in my carriage at Forty-fifth street and I ride clear down to my bankinghouse in Wall street, and I don't see anything." No, you do not want to see! The King and the Parliament. of England did not know that there were thirty-six barrels of gunpowder rolled into the vaults under the Parliament House. They did not know Guy Fawkes had his touchwood and matches all ready-ready to dash the Government of England into atoms. The conspiracy was revealed, however. I tell you I have explored the vaults of city life, and I am here this morning to tell you that there are deathful and explosive influences under all our cities, ready to destroy us with a great moral convulsion. Some men say: "I don't see anything of this, and I am not interested in it." You ought to be. You remind me of a man who has been shipwrecked with a thousand others. He happens to get up on the shore, and the others are all down in the surf. He goes up in a fisherman's cabin, and sits down to warm himself. The fisherman says: "Oh! this won't do. Come out and help me to get these others out of the surf." "Oh, no!" says the man; "it's my business now to warm myself." "But," says the fisherman, "these men are dying; are you not going to give them help?" "Oh, no! I've got ashore myself, and I must warm myself!" That is what people are doing in the church to-day. A great multitude are out in the surf of sin and death, going down forever; but men sit by the fire of the church, warming