IN a dirty, miserable loft, in a house in Whitechapel, a sick girl lay upon a heap of shavings on the floor, dying. Her surroundings were too wretched to describe: the panels of the door of the dwelling had long since been used for fuel, so had what had once served for a staircase to the loft the girl called home. She was too ill now to be able to be up, but before she was ill, she had passed in with a crowd to a theater, where an earnest evangelist was preaching. It was God who had drawn her there, though she did not know Him. It was as if He had whispered to her, “Hearken, O daughter! and consider, and incline thine ear,” while He spoke to her lost soul. When she left that crowd, she had had to do with One whom she had never met before; and perhaps, like Samaria’s daughter, she went on her way saying, “He told me all that ever I did; is not this the Christ?”
Afterward, when she lay languishing upon her heap of shavings, she had comfort in her heart that lifted her above the dreariness and misery in which she was. She had no Christian friend to read to her or lead her on; but, like John of old, she leaned her head on the bosom of her Lord, and when He gave her that rest, she heeded little the cold, and hunger, and want of her attic home. But she thirsted to tell out her heart to the messenger who had brought to her “the gospel of peace.” So she sent and begged him to come to her.
The evangelist very gladly hastened there, and having ascended as far as below the loft, he asked the woman living on that floor to lend him a candle; but she was not willing, she said, to get a light for a stranger, and thus repulsed he made his way as best he could to the poor girl’s apartment. When he heard her simple story what could he do but rejoice, and fall down on his knees and thank his Master? But when again he turned to her in all her earthly need, strong man though he was, and accustomed to sights and sounds of suffering in his “labor of love” in Whitechapel, what could he do but weep?
“Oh! do not cry,” she said, gently; “we shall meet again.” But his heart was sorely grieved to leave her thus, and he promised to send his wife to her that very day, to cheer and meet her need.
“There is no need,” she answered quietly. “In the home where I am going ‘They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore.’”
So he left her, and not long after the promised relief came; but she had not been mistaken, for God had taken her home.
He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from oil all faces. S. C. M. A.