"That sorrow's crown of sorrow
Is remembering happier things."
But the very light that cheered revealed more clearly the misery, dirt, and poverty around.
In one such street, where little pale-faced children, without the merriment and laughter of childhood, played in a languid, unchildlike way, sickness prevailed; for fever had broken out, and indoors suffering ones tossed on beds, if they could be so called, of sickness.
At the door of a small room in one of the houses stood a girl of some ten or eleven years old, looking out anxiously as if in expectation of some one, turning every now and then to address a word to her mother, who lay in the small room on a bed in the corner.
"He baint a-comin' yet," she said, "'cos I knows his step; but he'll be 'long soon—ye see if he don't! I knows as how he will, 'cos he's that kind; so don't ye fret, mother—the doctor 'ill be here in no time. There now! Susan Keats giv' me some tea for ye, and I'll get the water from her and bring you some prime and 'ot—ye see if I don't!" So saying, the child ran off and went into a room next door, and entering begged for some "'ot water." "Ye see," she said, addressing a woman poorly clad like herself, "she be a-frettin', mother is, for the doctor, for she's badly, is mother, to-day, and she thinks mayhap he'll do her good."
When the child returned to her mother's room, she found Dr. Heinz (for it was he) sitting by her mother's side and speaking kindly to her. He turned round as the child entered. "Come along, Gussie," he said; "that's right—been getting mother some tea. You'll need to tend her well, for she's very poorly to-day."
"Ay, ay," muttered the woman, "that's true, that's true. Be kind to Gussie, poor Gussie, when I am gone, doctor. The young lady—Miss Warden be her name—she said she'd look after her, she did."
The doctor bent over the dying woman and said some comforting words, at which the woman's face brightened. "God bless ye," she said, "for promising that. Oh, but life's been weary, weary sin' I came 'ere—work, work, and that not always to be 'ad. But it's true, sir, what ye told me. He says even to the like o' me, 'Come unto me, and I will give you rest;' and He's done it, I think. Ye'll come again, sir, won't ye?"
After a few moments of prayer with the poor woman, and giving her some medicine to allay her restlessness, Dr. Heinz left the room. From house to house in the fever-stricken street he went, ministering alike to body and soul, often feeling cast down and discouraged, overwhelmed at times by the vice and poverty of all around. The gospel had never reached these poor neglected ones. The very need of a Saviour was by the great majority of them unfelt. Love many of them had never experienced. The evil of sin they did not comprehend. Brought up from babyhood in the midst of iniquity, they were strangers to the very meaning of righteousness and virtue. No wonder that the heart of the doctor was oppressed as he went out and in amongst them. Yet he felt assured that by love they could be won to the God of love, and that only the simple gospel of Jesus Christ dying in their room and stead, told in the power of the Holy Ghost, could enlighten their dark souls and prove the true lever to raise them from their sin and misery. And so, whilst alleviating pain, he tried when possible to say a word from the book—God's revealed will, which alone "maketh wise unto salvation." More than once on the day we write of, as he went from house to house, the vision of a young girl whom he had often met going about doing good flitted before his eyes.
Gertie Warden and Dr. Heinz had first met in one of those abodes of wretchedness, where she stood by a bed of sickness trying to comfort and help a dying woman.