THE SITTING-ROOM OF THE BISMARCK
His name was Edward Dowling. He was a gentleman. He had soldiered under Sir Colin Campbell and Sir Henry Havelock in India. Later he owned a ranch in the West. Then an accident deprived him of the use of an eye, and he spent all he had in trying to preserve his sight. Homeless and penniless on the streets of New York, he had learned to do tinkering and the mending of umbrellas.
In his poverty he drifted to the bunk-house.
The following Sunday, at our meeting, he had an awakening which reminded me of the account of Paul’s conversion on the way to Damascus. It revolutionized his mental processes, and he began to give outward expression to his new-found inner joy.
He would buy some stale bread overnight, and early in the morning he would make coffee on the bunk-house stove in a quart tomato-can. Each man, before he left the place, had a bite of stale bread and at least a mouthful of warm coffee. Then they would uncover their heads while the old man asked God to bless them for the day.
He tinkered for a living, but his vocation became the conversion of men. From these small beginnings in quiet evangelism, he branched out into work of the same kind among the tenements. He mended pots, kettles, and pans, and charged for the job a chapter in the Bible. I came on him suddenly one morning in an alley. Snow was on the ground, and he was reading a chapter with his face close to a broken pane. It appeared he had done some soldering for an Irishwoman, and asked the privilege of reading to her.
“Begorra,” she said, “the house isn’t fit to read the Holy Book in, but if yez w’u’dn’t mind reading through the window, I’ll take the rags out.”
So she took the bundle out of the broken pane, and Dowling bent over and read his chapter.
When the Rev. John Hopkins Dennison took charge of the old Church of Sea and Land, he established a sort of latter-day monastery in the old square tower, and there Brother Dowling 463 had a cell, where he lived and worked among the poor for many years.
In an escapade with two other soldiers in the Sepoy rebellion, Dowling had looted the palace of a raja. In the act of burying several canes filled with diamonds, one of the three was shot dead. Dowling and the other escaped. One day on the Bowery, forty years afterward, a man laid his hand on Dowling’s shoulder and asked him what he did with the loot. It was the other man.