The hour came, and the Methodist had done well his part in the opening exercises, and the Congregationalist had made his temperance speech. They seemed to have forgotten altogether that the remaining portion of the hour belonged to me, and called for several five and ten minute speeches, after which there was a pause, then everybody was startled by a little woman stepping on the platform, claiming her right to the remaining portion of the evening. Her plea was made, and her appeal also. At the close, two women responded, one making her note valuable for $10, another for $25.

Aside from that the audience sat as cool and immovable as though a torrent of ice water had been thrown upon them, and for days the poor little woman had to feel that her name was in everybody's mouth. If a lion had been let loose in the community it would not have caused greater talk. But having lived through this, I ventured one more presentation of the work in a neighboring village, which was responded to encouragingly, by a number of my notes being made valuable by amount and signature; but it was not until June of the same year that I turned my attention exclusively to the work of raising money for a voluntary reformatory, and presenting the necessity of the compulsory. My time during the remainder of the winter and spring being so closely occupied in the interest of a fallen girl, who was then in our jail, and who for months had been held a prisoner in a house of ill-fame, where she had appropriated part of the money given her in trust by one of the visitors of that haunt of vice, for which she was arrested for theft, and was in jail waiting her trial. But finding that the penalty for her crime would be the penitentiary, as she had passed her sixteenth year, the age at which the same crime would have committed her to the reform school for girls, I turned my attention to circulating a petition to support the bill then pending in the legislature changing the time of admission from sixteen to eighteen years; but after all my vigilant labor the bill, after having passed the House and being favorably reported on by the com

mittee of the Senate, was lost for the want of some one interested enough to fish it out of the sifting basket, into which so many bills go and are lost, for the want of support from some good lobbyist. Not being there in person, I found I was working at too long a range, so turned my attention to our court, begging lenience for the girl, under promise that she would amend her life. Then came the qustion, "where could she go, and who would take her in?"

Despite her good resolution her every appearance told all too well what society she had been in to admit of her being taken into any private family and as there was not in all Iowa any reformatory institution for a girl over sixteen, I resolved to go begging and found, in a younger State than ours, shelter in a Catholic institution maintained and presided over by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. I will never forget the humiliation that I felt as a Protestant of Iowa seeking the sheltering care of one of Iowa's daughters of those Catholic Sisters of St. Paul, Minn., whose religion I had always been taught was antagonistic to mine. But as the Mother Superior so kindly received the girl, giving her such good advice, furnished me with such comfortable entertainment during the night that I spent there, allowed me to join them in their morning devotion, and gave me the privilege of addressing the girls as they sat at their work, some seventy-five of them, plying the industries by which they were helping to earn the daily bread of the house, and as she took me to the apartment where were seated twenty-five or thirty so neatly attired in the costume of the order, engaged in their fine sewing and needle work which also contributed to the support of the house, she said, "These are our Magdalens," which meant picked up from the gutter, perfectly saved for they had taken the vow to remain.

I must confess I bowed to the cloister and said, "Amen! you are better off here even if you never cross the threshold of this house during your life than you would be in such awful sinks of vice as are polluting every city and hamlet in

our own State where the loveliest forms of girlhood yield to the power of vice and disease and sink into the prostitute's grave in a few short years, and whose places are continually being supplied by victims who have first been seduced and then when no refuge of Christian shelter is open to them, they seek and find shelter in these and in their turn go down."

I was privileged also with an account of their financial standing. The story of how they first went out begging and raised sufficient to make a payment on their comfortable quarters, and now by their industries, which embrace laundry work as well as sewing, they were not only supporting their household, numbering one hundred and fifty, and keeping up the interest, but reducing their indebtedness annually.

In the presence of all this, is it any wonder that I should pledge my life to go and do likewise, feeling the positive assurance that what Catholic women could do in Minnesota, the Protestant women can do in Iowa and would if the subject was properly presented to them.

One of the outside sisters kindly conducted me to another refuge in the city, under the auspices of the Protestant churches. Here I found them in a rented building, unable to support only a small family, but doing a grand reformatory work to the few they were able to care for. I had heard of Mother Van Cleaves' work for the fallen in Minneapolis, and embraced the opportunity of visiting it. Here, also, I found them paying a high rent and only able to shelter a few.

Mrs. Walker, one of the board of managers, planned for me to meet with Mother Van Cleaves, by inviting us both to her house. In the presence of this white-haired mother in Israel I received fresh inspiration, zeal and willingness to become a beggar, as I listened to her story of how when she had found two of those unfortunate creatures tired and sick of their low life, and anxious for Christian shelter, she, with promised help from but one good man, took the responsibility of renting a building, and then went out begging, as she said, a cast off chair here, a bedstead there, until she had got sufficient

together to partly furnish the house; then she secured a lady to take charge and began to take the unfortunates in. With rent to pay and the support of the home to be kept up, she found the necessity of applying herself almost constantly as a beggar. The work was new, unthought of by nearly all she met. She was wont to meet refusals, and sometimes almost abused, for undertaking work so low, but she said, laughingly: "I had a very pleasant way of not hearing their unkind words, for all I had to do was drop my trumpet, and then I would not hear a word they said, but went right on begging them for the means to carry on my work, endeavoring always to keep in the spirit of a nun of the order of the vow of extreme poverty, whom I saw once in Cincinnati, in her sombre dress, enter a place of business and approach one of the firm with her outstretched hand, and their only appeal, 'can you give me something for my poor?' The man, perhaps grown impatient by her oft repeated appeals, gave her a thrust which almost amounted to a blow, and in reality placed her outside the door. She stood for a few moments in silence, as though doing battle with any feeling that the rude treatment might have caused, and then turning re-entered, and approaching the same man again, she said: "The blow you gave was for me, that was all right, but can you give me something for my poor?' That time her appeal was kindly responded to. So I also kept on begging. And thus the institution has been supported from year to year, and many have been rescued from the haunts of vice and have been restored to society clothed in their right minds."

Just here my physical strength gave way. The excitement and responsibility from the time I persuaded the young girl to plead guilty to a penitentiary offense in order to have the jail for a boarding place for her while I brought reformatory measures to bear, not knowing whether the court would be as lenient as I hoped, together with the labor and anxiety over the bill pending in the legislature; the failure to obtain it; the seeking of shelter with the Catholic Sisters; and above

all, the excitement of taking the young girl in disguise to St. Paul, fearing lest the saloon-keeper from whose lecherous greed I had snatched her might, after all, get possession of her before she was safely housed with the Sisters, had been too great a strain and nature demanded pay back for the heavy draft made upon her. But while I was resting the physical, the mental kept thinking on as to the steps by which womanhood descended so low. The power of her influence over youth and even manhood from the depths of her degradation and the "how" to lift her from her low estate and return her to paths of rectitude, were the plans that were continually evolving.

It was self-evident that I had committed a great depredation on the saloon-keeper in rescuing the young girl above alluded to, and well might I fear his wrath. For while he had her as an attraction in his saloon, their boast was that they could sell a half dozen kegs of beer a day, but when once she was safely out of his hands the pitiful whine came from those interested with him, "we have dull times at our corner now. We cannot sell half a keg of beer a day." In this case the "Bar Maid System" which is attracting so mnch attention fearing lest it be imported from England, was fully demonstrated. For with the presence of this beautiful "Bar Maid" a half dozen kegs of beer would be sold where half a keg could scarcely be disposed of in the absence of this charm.

Sitting at home under the doctor's care with almost a crushing weight upon me of this responsibility in how far was I my sister's keeper, and why was this burden rolled so heavily on me who had not a dollar to invest and who had not strength to go out and solicit it from others? Continually the question was coming, "Was it my daughter who had been seduced and, in prospective motherhood, was seeking shelter in a den of infamy, and that when all the world beside was closed to her; or was it my daughter shut in powerless before those merciless fiends with whom she had to mingle; or my son just to be lured in to be robbed of his virtue in boyhood,