A LOST HUSBAND.
In a seaside home last Christmas there was a sorrowing wife, who mourned over the basest desertion of her husband. Wandering from place to place drinking, he had left her to struggle alone with four little ones dependent upon her exertions.
Knowing her distress, the captain of the corps wrote begging us to advertise for the man in the Cry. We did this, but for some time heard nothing of the result.
Several weeks later a Salvationist entered a beer-house, where a group of men were drinking, and began to distribute War Crys amongst them, speaking here and there upon the eternity which faced everyone.
At the counter stood a man with a pint pot in hand, who took one of the papers passed to him, and glancing carelessly down its columns caught sight of his own name, and was so startled that the pot fell from his grasp to the floor. "Come home," the paragraph ran, "and all will be forgiven."
His sin faced him; the thought of a broken-hearted wife and starving children conquered him completely, and there and then he left the public-house, and started to walk home—a distance of many mile— arriving there about midnight the same night, after an absence of eleven months.
The letter from his wife telling the good news of his return, spoke also of his determination by God's help to be a different man, and they are both attendants at the Salvation Army barracks.
A SEDUCER COMPELLED TO PAY.
Amongst the letters that came to the Inquiry Office one morning was one from a girl who asked us to help her to trace the father of her child who had for some time ceased to pay anything towards its support. The case had been brought into the Police Court, and judgment given in her favour, but the guilty one had hidden, and his father refused to reveal his whereabouts.
We called upon the elder man and laid the matter before him, but failed to prevail upon him either to pay his son's liabilities or to put us into communication with him. The answers to an advertisement in the War Cry, however, had brought the required in formation as to his son's whereabouts, and the same morning that our Inquiry Officer communicated with the police, and served a summons for the overdue money, the young man had also received a letter from his father advising him to leave the country at once. He had given notice to his employers; and the #16 salary he received, with some help his father had sent him towards the journey, he was compelled to hand over to the mother of his child.