It was at this time that Tom Coppin, Captain Coppin of the Salvation Army, paid his only visit to Angela, that visit that caused so much sensation among the girls.

He chose a quiet evening early in the week. Why he came has never been quite clear. It was not curiosity, for he had none; nor was it a desire to study the kind of culture which Angela had introduced among her friends, for he had no knowledge of, or desire for, culture at all. Nor does the dressmakers' workshop afford a congenial place for the exercise of that soldier's gifts. He came, perhaps, because he was passing on his way from a red-hot prayer meeting to a red-hot preaching, and he thought he would see the place which among others, the Advanced Club for instance, was keeping his brother from following in his own steps, and helping him to regard the world, its pleasures and pursuits, with eyes of affection. One knows not what he expected to find or what he proposed by going there, because the things he did find completely upset all his expectations, if he had any. Visions, perhaps, of the soul-destroying dance, and the red cup, and the loud laughter of fools, and the talk that is as the crackling of thorns, were in his mind.

The room was occupied, as usual, with the girls, Angela among them. Captain Sorensen was there too; the girls were quietly busy, for the most part, over "their own" work, because, if they would go fine, they must make their own fineries; it was a frosty night, and the fire was burning clear; in the most comfortable chair beside it sat the crippled girl of whom we know; the place was hers by a sort of right; she was gazing into the flames, listening lazily to the music—Angela had been playing—and doing nothing, with contentment. Life was so sweet to the child when she was not suffering pain, and was warm, and was not hungry, and was not hearing complaints, that she wanted nothing more. Nelly, for her part, sat with hands folded pensively, and Angela wondered what, of late days, it was that seemed to trouble her.

Suddenly the door opened, and a man, dressed in a tight uniform of dark cloth and a cap of the same, with "S. S." upon it, like the Lord Mayor's gold chain, stood before them.

He did not remove his cap, but he looked round the room, and presently called in a loud, harsh voice:

"Which of you here answers to the name of Kennedy?"

"I do," replied Angela; "my name is Kennedy. What is yours, and why do you come here?"

"My name is Coppin. My work is to save souls. I tear them out of the very clutches and claws of the devil; I will have them; I leave them no peace until I have won them; I cry aloud to them; I shout to them; I pray for them; I sing to them; I seek them out in their hiding-places, even in their dens and courts of sin; there are none too far gone for my work; none that I will let go once I get a grip of them; once my hand is on them out they must come if the devil and all his angels were pulling them the other way. For my strength is not of myself; it is——"

"But why do you come here?" asked Angela.

The man had the same black hair and bright eyes as his brother; the same strong voice, although a long course of street-shouting had made it coarse and rough; but his eyes were brighter, his lips more sensitive, his forehead higher; he was like his brother in all respects, yet so unlike that, while the Radical had the face of a strong man, the preacher had in his the indefinable touch of weakness which fanaticism always brings with it. Whatever else it was, however, the face was that of a man terribly in earnest.

"I have heard about you," he said. "You are of those who cry peace when there is no peace; you entice the young men and maidens who ought to be seeking pardon and preaching repentance, and you destroy their souls with dancing and music. I come here to tell you that you are one of the instruments of the devil in this wicked town."

"Have you really come here, Mr. Coppin, on purpose to tell me that?"

"That," he said, "is part of my message."

"Do you think," asked Angela, because this was almost intolerable, "that it is becoming a preacher like yourself to invade a quiet and private house in order to insult a woman?"

"Truth is not insult," he said. "I come here as I would go to a theatre or a singing-hall or any soul-destroying place. You shall hear the plain truth. With your music and your dancing and your pleasant ways, you are corrupting the souls of many. My brother is hardened in his unrepentance since he knew you. My cousin goes on laughing, and dances over the very pit of destruction, through you. These girls——"

"Oh!" cried Rebekah, who had no sympathy with the Salvation Army, and felt herself an authority when the religious question was touched, "they are all mad. Let him go away."

"I would," replied the captain, "that you were half as mad. Oh! I know you now; I know you snug professors of a Saturday religion——"

"Your mission," Angela interrupted, "is not, I am sure, to argue about another sect. Come, Mr. Coppin, now that you have told us who you are and what is your profession and why you come here, you might like to preach to us. Do so, if you will. We were sitting here quietly when you came, and you interrupt nothing. So that, if it would really make you feel any happier, you may preach to us for a few minutes."

He looked about him in hesitation. This kind of preaching was not in his line: he loved a vast hall with a thousand faces looking at him; or a crowd of turbulent roughs ready to answer the Message with a volley of brickbats; or a chance gathering of unrepentant sinners in a wide thoroughfare. He could lift up his voice to them; but to preach in a quiet room to a dozen girls was a new experience.

And it was not the place which he had expected. His brother, in their last interview, had thrown in his teeth this house and its doings as offering a more reasonable solution of life's problems than his own. "You want everybody," he said, "to join you in singing and preaching every day; what should we do when there was nobody left to preach at? Now, there, what they say is, 'Let us make ourselves comfortable.' There's a deal in that, come to think of.

"Look at those girls now: while you and your Happy Elizas are trampin' in the mud with your flag and your procession, and gettin' black eyes and brickbats, they are singin' and laughin' and dancin', and makin' what fun they can for themselves. It seems to me, Tom, that if this kind of thing gets fashionable you and your army will be played out."

Well, he had come to see this place, which had offered pleasure instead of repentance, as a method of improving life. They were not laughing and singing at all; there were no men present except one old gentleman in a blue coat with brass buttons. To be sure, he had a fiddle lying on a chair beside him. There was no indication whatever of the red cup, and no smell of tobacco. Now, pleasure without drink, tobacco, and singing had been in Tom's unregenerate days incomprehensible. "I would rather," said Dick, "see an army of Miss Kennedy's girls than an army of Hallelujah Polls." Yet they seemed perfectly quiet. "Make 'em happy, Tom, first," said Dick, who was still thinking over Harry's speech as a possible point of departure. Happiness is not a word in the dictionary of men like Tom Coppin; they know what it means; they know a spree; they understand drink; they know misery, because it is all round them—the misery of hunger, of disease, of intemperance, of dirt, of evil temper, of violence; the misery which the sins of one bring all, and sins of all upon each. Indeed, we need not go to Whitechapel to find out misery. But they know not happiness. For such as Captain Coppin there is, as an alternative for misery, the choice of glory. What they mean by glory is ecstasy, the rapture, the mysteries of emotional religion; he, they believe, is the most advanced who is most often hysterical; Dick, like many of his followers, yearned honestly and unselfishly to extend this rapture which he himself so often enjoyed: but that there should be any other way out of the misery save by way of the humble stool of conviction, was a thing which he could not understand. Happiness, calm, peace, content, the sweet enjoyment of innocent recreation—these things he knew nothing of; they had not come his way.

He had come; he had seen; no doubt the moment his back was turned the orgy would begin. But he had delivered his message: he had warned the young woman who had led the girls—that calm, cold woman who looked at him with curiosity and was so unmoved by what he said: he might go. With his whole heart he had spoken and had so far moved no one except the daughter of the Seventh-Day Independent—and her only a little. This kind of thing is very irritating. Suppose you were to put a red-hot poker into a jug of water without producing any steam or hissing at all, how, as a natural philosopher, would you feel?

"You may preach to us, if you like," said Miss Kennedy.

She sat before him, resting her chin upon her hand. He knew that she was beautiful, although women and their faces, graces, and sweet looks played no part at all in his thoughts. He felt, without putting the thing into words, that she was beautiful. Also, that she regarded him with a kind of contempt, as well as curiosity; also, that she had determined not to be moved by anything he might say; also, that she relied on her own influence over the girls. And he felt for a moment as if his trusty arms were dropping from his hands and his whole armor was slipping from his shoulders. Not her beauty; no, fifty Helens of Troy would not have moved this young apostle; but her position as an impregnable outsider. For against the curious outsider, who regard captains in the Salvation Army only as so many interesting results of growing civilization, their officers are powerless indeed.

If there is any real difference between the working-man of England and the man who does other work, it is that the former is generally emotional and the latter is not. To the man of emotion things cannot be stated too strongly; his leader is he who has the greatest command of adjectives; he is singularly open to the charm of eloquence; he likes audacity of statement; he likes to be moved by wrath, pity, and terror; he has no eye for shades of color; and when he is most moved he thinks he is most right. It is this which makes him so angry with the people who cannot be moved.

Angela was one of those persons who cannot be moved by the ordinary methods. She looked at Tom as if he was some strange creature, watching what he did, listening to what he said, as if she was not like unto him. It is not quite a fair way of describing Angela's attitude of mind; but it is near enough; and it represents what passed through the brain of the Salvation captain.

"Will you preach to us?" she repeated the third time.

He mechanically opened his hymn-book.

"Number three hundred and sixty-two," he said quietly.

He sang the hymn all by himself, at the top of his voice, so that the windows rattled, to one of those rousing and popular melodies which have been pressed into the service of the army; it was, in fact, "Molly Darling," and the people at Stepney Green asked each other in wonder if a meeting of the Salvation Army was actually being held at Miss Kennedy's.

When he had finished his hymn he began to preach.

He stammered at first, because the surroundings were strange; besides, the cold, curious eyes of Miss Kennedy chilled him. Presently, however, he recovered self-possession, and began his address.

There is one merit, at least, possessed by these preachers; it is that of simplicity. Whatever else they may be, they are always the same; even the words do not vary while there is but one idea.

If you want to influence the dull of comprehension, such as the common donkey, there is but one way possible. He cannot be led, or coaxed, or persuaded; he must be thwacked. Father Stick explains and makes apparent, instantly, what the logic of all the schools has failed to prove. In the same way, if you wish to awaken the spiritual emotions among people who have hitherto been strange to them, your chance is not by argument, but by appeals, statements, prophecies, threats, terrors, and pictures, which, in fact, do exactly correspond, and produce the same effect as Father Stick; they are so many knock-down blows; they belabor and they terrify.

The preacher began: the girls composed themselves to listen, with the exception of Rebekah, who went on with her work ostentatiously, partly to show her disapproval of such irregular proceedings and partly as one who, having got the truth from an independent source, and being already advanced in the narrow way, had no occasion for the captain's persuasion.

It is one thing to hear the voice of a street preacher in his own church, so to speak, that is, on the curbstone, and quite another thing to hear the same man and the same person in a quiet room. Tom Coppin had only one sermon, though he dressed it up sometimes, but not often, in new words. Yet he was relieved of monotony by the earnestness which he poured into it. He believed in it, himself; that goes a long way. Angela began by thinking of the doctrine, but presently turned her attention to the preacher, and began to think what manner of man he was. Personally he was pale and thin, with strong black hair, like his brother, and his eyes were singularly bright.

Here was a man of the people: self-taught; profoundly ignorant as to the many problems of life and its solutions; filled, however, with that noble sympathy which makes prophets, poets, martyrs; wholly possessed of faith in his narrow creed, owning no authority of church or priest; believing himself under direct Divine guidance, chosen and called, the instrument of merciful Heaven to drag guilty souls from the pit; consciously standing as a servant, day and night, before a Throne which other men regard afar off or cannot see at all; actually living the life of hardship, privation, and ill-treatment, which he preached; for the sake of others, enduring hardness, poverty, contumely; taking all these things as part and parcel of the day's work; and, in the name of duty, searching into corners and holes of this great town for the vilest, the most hardened, the most depraved, the most blinded to a higher life.

This, if you please, is not a thing to be laughed at. What did Wesley more? What did Whitfield? Nay, what did Paul?

They paid him for his services, it is true; they gave him five-and-twenty shillings a week; some of this great sum he gave away; the rest provided him with poor and simple food. He had no pleasures or joys of life; he had no recreations; he had no hope of any pleasures; some of the officers of his army—being men and women as well as preachers—loved each other and were married; but this man had no thought of any such thing, he, as much as any monk, was vowed to the service of the Master, without rest or holiday, or any other joy than that of doing the work that lay before him.

A great pity and sympathy filled Angela's heart as she thought of these things.

The man before her was for the moment a prophet; it mattered nothing that his creed was narrow, his truths only half truths, his doctrine commonplace, his language in bad taste, his manner vulgar; the faith of the man covered up and hid these defects; he had a message to mankind; he was delivering that message; to him it was a fresh, new message, never before intrusted to any man; he had to deliver it perpetually, even though he went in starvation.

Angela's heart softened as she realized the loyalty of the man. He saw the softening in her eyes and thought it was the first sign of conviction.

But it was not.

Meantime, if Angela was thinking of the preacher, the girls, of course with the exception of Rebekah, were trembling at his words.

Suddenly—the unexpected change was a kind of rhetorical trick which often proved effective—the preacher ceased to denounce and threaten, and spoke of pardon and peace; he called upon them in softer voice, in accents full of tears and love, to break down their pride, to hear the voice that called them.... We know well enough what he said, only we do not know how he said it. Angela looked about the room. The Captain sat with his hands on his knees, and his face dutifully lifted to the angle which denotes attention; his expression was unmoved; evidently, the captain was not open to conviction. As for the girls, they might be divided into classes. They had all listened to the threats and the warnings, though they had heard them often enough before; now, however, some of them seemed as if they were impatient, and as if with a little encouragement they could break into scoffing. But others were crying, and one or two were steadfastly regarding the speaker, as if he had mesmerized them. Among these was Nelly. Her eyes were fixed, her lips were parted, her breathing was quick, her cheek was pale.

Great and wonderful is the power of eloquence; there are few orators; this ex-printer, this uneducated man of the ranks was, like his brother, born with the gift that is so rare. He should have been taken away and taught, and kept from danger, and properly fed and cared for. And now it is too late. They said of him in his connection that he was blessed in the saving of souls: the most stubborn, the most hardened, when they fell under the magic of his presence and his voice, were broken and subdued; what wonder that a weak girl should give way?

When he paused he looked round; he noted the faces of those whom he had mesmerized; he raised his arm; he pointed to Nelly and beckoned her, without a word, to rise.

Then the girl stood up as if she could not choose but obey. She moved a step toward him; in a moment she would have been at his feet, with sobs and tears, in the passion of self-abasement which is so dear to the revivalist. But Angela broke the spell. She sprang toward her, caught her in her own arms, and passed her hand before her eyes.

"Nelly!" she said gently. "Nelly, dear."

The girl sank back in her chair, and buried her face in her hands. But the moment was gone, and Captain Coppin had lost his recruit.

They all breathed a deep sigh. Those who had not been moved looked at each other and laughed; those who were, dried their eyes and seemed ashamed.

"Thank you," said Angela to the preacher. "You have preached very well, and I hope your words will help us on our way, even though it is not quite your way."

"Then be of our way. Cease from scoffing."

She shook her head.

"No, I do not scoff, but I cannot join your way. Leave us now, Mr. Coppin. You are a brave man. Let us reverence courage and loyalty. But we will have no more sermons in this room. Good-night."

She offered him her hand, but he would not take it, and with a final warning, addressed to Angela in particular and the room in general, he went as he had come, without greeting or word of thanks.

"These Salvation people," said Rebekah, "are all mad. If people want the way of truth there's the chapel in Redman's Row, and father's always in it every Saturday."

"What do you say, Captain Sorensen?" asked Angela.

"The Church of England," said the captain, who had not been moved a whit, "says that two sacraments are necessary. I find nothing about stools of repentance. Come, Nelly, my girl, remember that you are a Church-woman."

"Yet," said Angela, "what are we to say when a man is so brave and true, and when he lives the life? Nelly dear—girls all—I think that religion should not be a terror but a great calm and a trust. Let us love each other and do our work and take the simple happiness that God gives, and have faith. What more can we do? To-night, I think, we cannot dance or sing, but I will play to you."

She played to them—grand and solemn music—so that the terror went out of their brains, and the hardening out of their hearts, and next day all was forgotten.

In this manner and this once did Tom Coppin cross Angela's path. Now he will cross it no more, because his work is over. If a man lives on less than the bare necessaries in order to give to others; if he does the work of ten men; if he gives himself no rest any day in the week, what happens to that man when typhus seizes him?

He died, as he had lived, in glory, surrounded by Joyful Jane, Hallelujah Jem, Happy Polly, Thankful Sarah, and the rest of them. His life has been narrated in the "War Cry;" it is specially recorded of him that he was always "on the mountains," which means, in their language, that he was a man of strong faith, free from doubt, and of emotional nature.

The extremely wicked and hardened family, consisting of an old woman and half a dozen daughters, for whose soul's sake he starved himself and thereby fell an easy prey to the disease, have nearly all found a refuge in the workhouse, and are as hardened as ever, though not so wicked, because some kinds of wickedness are not allowed in that place of virtue. Therefore it seems almost as if poor Tom's life has been fooled away. According to a philosophy which makes a great deal of noise just now, every life is but a shadow, a dream, a mockery, a catching at things impossible, and a waste of good material, ending with the last breath. Then all our lives are fooled away, and why not Tom's as well as the rest? But if the older way of thinking is, after all, right, then that life can hardly have been wasted which was freely given—even if the gift was not accepted—for the advantage of others. Because the memory and the example remain, and every example—if boys and girls could only be taught this copy-book truth—is like an inexhaustible horn, always filled with precious seed.