goods on him O.K." He was a quiet, reticent old man of sixty, an
Irishman who had served in the British Army in India with Havelock and
Colin Campbell. He had bought a ranch in the West, but an accident to
one of his eyes forced him to spend all his money to save the other
one. He drifted in to New York, penniless and without a friend. Seeing
a tinker mending umbrellas one day on the street, he sat down beside
him and watched the process. In that way he learned something of the
trade.

One Sunday afternoon when I was rallying a congregation in the
bunk-house, I found him on his cot, reading the life of Buffalo Bill.
I invited him down to the meeting, but he politely refused, saying
that he was an Episcopalian. The following Sunday he did come, and his
was the most striking spiritual crisis that I had ever seen. His
conversion was clean-cut, definite and clear; it was of a kind with
the conversion of Paul on the way to Damascus. He was an exceedingly
intelligent man, and could repeat more classic poetry by heart than
any man I have ever known. He came out from that brown mass of human
flotsam and jetsam on the Sunday afternoon following his conversion,
and told them what had happened to him.

The lodgers were very much impressed. It was in the winter-time. The
old man earned very little money at his new trade, but what he had he
shared with his fellow-lodgers. The bouncer told me that the old
tinker would buy a stale loaf for a few cents, then in the
dormitory he would make coffee in tomato cans and gather half a dozen
of the hungriest around him, and share his meal with them--plain bread
soaked in unsweetened coffee. Sometimes he would read a few verses of
the Bible to them, and sometimes merely say in his clear Irish voice:
"There, now, God bliss ye!"