MY Dear Mother: When I wrote you last we were
quite prosperous, having just come through with
our first evening as a great success; and everybody since
has been saying most agreeable things to us about it.
Last Thursday, we had our second, and it was even
pleasanter than the last, because people had got acquainted,
so that they really wanted to see each other again.
There was a most charming atmosphere of ease and
sociability. Bolton and Mr. St. John are getting quite
intimate. Mr. St. John, too, develops quite a fine social
talent, and has come out wonderfully. The side of a
man that one sees in the church and the pulpit is after
all only one side, as we have discovered. I find that he
has quite a gift in conversation, when you fairly get him
at it. Then, his voice for singing comes into play, and
he and Angie and Dr. Campbell and Alice make up a
quartette quite magnificent for non-professionals. Angie
has a fine soprano, and Alice takes the contralto, and the
Doctor, with his great broad shoulders and deep chest,
makes a splendid bass. Mr. St. John's tenor is really
very beautiful. It is one of those penetrating, sympathetic
voices that indicate both feeling and refinement,
and they are all of them surprised and delighted
to find how well they go together. Thursday evening
they went on from thing to thing, and found that they
could sing this and that and the other, till the evening
took a good deal the form of a musical. But never
mind, it brought them acquainted with each other and
made them look forward to the next reunion as something
agreeable. Ever since, the doctor goes round
humming tunes, and says he wants St. John to try the
tenor of this and that, and really has quite lost sight of
his being anything else but a musical brother. So here
is the common ground I wanted to find between them.
The doctor has told Mr. St. John to call on him
whenever he can make him useful in his visits among the
poor. Our doctor loves to talk as if he were a hard-hearted,
unbelieving pirate, who didn't care a straw for
his fellow-creatures, while he loses no opportunity to do
anybody or anything a kindness.
You know I told you in my last letter about a girl
that Harry and Bolton found in the street, the night of
our first reception, and that they took her to the St. Barnabas
Refuge. The poor creature has been lying there
ever since, sick of a brain fever, caught by cold and exposure,
and Dr. Campbell has given his services daily.
If she had been the richest lady in the land, he could
not have shown more anxiety and devotion to her than
he has, calling twice and sometimes three times a day,
and one night watching nearly all night. She is still too
low and weak to give any account of herself; all we
know of her is that she is one of those lost sheep, to
seek whom the Good Shepherd would leave the ninety
nine who went not astray. I have been once or twice to
sit by her, and relieve the good Sisters who have so
much else to do; and Angelique and Alice have also
taken their turns. It seems very little for us to do,
when these good women spend all their time and all
their strength for those who have no more claim on them
than they have on us.
It is a week since I began this letter, and something
quite surprising to me has just developed.
I told you we had been to help nurse the poor girl at
the Sisters', and the last week she has been rapidly
mending. Well, yesterday, as I didn't feel very well,
and my Mary is an excellent nurse, I took her there to
sit with the patient in my place, when a most strange
scene ensued. The moment Mary looked on her, she
recognized her own daughter, who had left her some
years ago with a bad man. Mary had never spoken to
me of this daughter, and I only knew, in a sort of general
way, that she had left her mother under some painful
circumstances. The recognition was dreadfully agitating
to Mary and to the poor girl; indeed, for some
time it was feared that the shock would produce a relapse.
The Sisters say that the poor thing has been
constantly calling for her mother in her distress.
It really seemed, for the time, as if Mary were going
to be wholly unnerved. She has a great deal of that respectable
pride of family character which belongs to the
better class of the Irish, and it has been a bitter humiliation
to her to have to acknowledge her daughter's
shame to me; but I felt that it would relieve her to tell
the whole story to some one, and I drew it all out of
her. This poor Maggie had the misfortune to be very
handsome. She was so pretty as a little girl, her mother
tells me, as to attract constant attention; and I rather
infer that the father and mother both made a pet and
plaything of her, and were unboundedly indulgent. The
girl grew up handsome, and thoughtless, and self-confident,
and so fell an easy prey to a villain who got her to
leave her home, on a promise of marriage which he never
kept. She lived with him a while in one place and
another, and he became tired of her and contrived to
place her in a house of evil, where she was entrapped
and enslaved for a long time. Having by some means
found out where her mother was living, she escaped from
her employers, and hung round the house irresolutely
for some time, wishing but fearing to present herself, and
when she spoke to Harry in the street, the night after
our party, she was going in a wild, desperate way to ask
something about her mother—knowing that he was the
man with whom she was living.
Such seems to be her story; but I suppose, what with
misery and cold, and the coming on of the fever, the
poor thing hardly had her senses, or knew what she was
about—the fever must have been then upon her.
So you see, dear mother, I was wishing in my last
that I could go off with Sibyl Selwyn on her mission to
the lost sheep, and now here is one brought to my very
door. Is not this sent to me as my work? as if the good
Lord had said, “No, child, your feet are not strong
enough to go over the stones and briars, looking for the
lost sheep; you are not able to take them out of the jaws
of the wolf; but here is a poor wounded lamb that I
leave at your door—that is your part of the great work.”
So I understand it, and I have already told Mary that as
soon as Maggie is able to sit up, we will take her home
with us, and let her stay with us till she is strong and
well, and then we will try and put her back into good
respectable ways, and keep her from falling again.
I think persons in our class of life cannot be too considerate
of the disadvantages of poor working women in
the matter of bringing up children.
A very beautiful girl in that walk of life is exposed
to solicitation and temptation that never come near to
people in our stations. We are guarded on all hands by
our very position. I can see in this poor child the wreck
of what must have been very striking beauty. Her hair
is lovely, her eyes are wonderfully fine, and her hands,
emaciated as she is, are finely formed and delicate.
Well, being beautiful, she was just like any other young
girl—her head was turned by flattery. She was silly and
foolish, and had not the protections and barriers that are
around us, and she fell. Well, then, we that have been
more fortunate must help her up. Is it not so?
So, dear Mother, my mission work is coming to me.
I need not go out for it. I shall write more of this in a
day or two.
