HERE will be no one to-night,

The sign consisted of a single word,

with a sigh; and he went back to his place at the shop-window, peering out into the street through the dingy panes.

Two hundred yards away the electric trams were passing incessantly, stopping a few seconds and then, with loud clangings of their gongs, starting off again toward Aldgate and Poplar. At the corner of West India Dock Road, the wide, straight avenue along which the tracks stretched into the far distance opened out into a crossing. Here were several international "Sailors' Homes," a hotel, and a public house, above which, like a shining and mysterious halo, shone the great letters of an electric sign, "The Star of the East." But the street cars, and in truth all these other symbols of a frenzied Occidental civilization, regained their true perspective when viewed from the corner of Limehouse Causeway from the spot, to be more exact, occupied by the freshly painted front of a tiny shop. A shop? It was hardly more than a stall, but the newly gilded lettering in the sign above it glowed like a declaration of faith; and it seemed to turn with indifference from the bright, glittering avenue where progress, with all the clatter of its competitive vulgarity, was passing, to open its doors by preference on the narrow alleyway down which wiser races had sought refuge.

dow hung a more ambitious placard, which read, "Several languages spoken here, and all understood."

This advertisement, displayed as it was on the outskirts of London's Asiatic quarter, might have seemed little less than boastful; and yet it but feebly expressed the boundless goodwill of its two authors. Every evening they waited there behind the spattered panes for some one to come and ask them for what they had to give, and every evening they lamented having been asked for so little, the one disconsolate at seeing his supply of bandages and remedies, carefully assembled and with such outreaching love, diminish so slowly as it lay on the shelves in the too perfect order that testified to its uselessness; the other inconsolable because the too infrequent patients were all infidels, hardened in the error of their ways, suspicious and hostile, coming to have the wounds of their bodies cared for, but jealously hardening their hearts against the voice of the one true God, even while their souls hovered on the edge of the everlasting abyss.

On the sidewalk opposite, a group of Chinese sailors were smoking indolently, their slant eyes gazing about at this corner of a barbarous city that could no longer astonish them. Long ago they had learned what was good

for their own uses in this strange civilization, and contemptuously, mockingly, they watched the white barbarians around them avidly grasping at things which they, the yellow men, thought good to leave alone.

Father Flanagan was contemplating them through the window-pane with a sort of melancholy covetousness. Some of these, or others like them, would probably step into his dispensary sooner or later. With many marks of respect and gratitude they would come to have a cut bandaged or to ask for medicine. They would listen willingly enough to his advice, and accept some of his tracts, deferentially putting them away in an inner pocket of their jackets; but then, with reiterated thanks and an inscrutable smile, they would go away, and he knew they would never come again.

The care his nephew gave them, the magic philters he put up in little bottles without charge, were among the things they considered good for their uses; but the care he, Father Flanagan, wanted to give their souls, the health-giving formulas he longed to teach them, were, it seemed, among those things they considered good to leave alone. With indulgent patience they would let him exhort them, and all in vain!-politely dissimulating the scornful wisdom of a race grown weary of believing before other races had even invented their creeds.

"There will be no one to-night, Timmy," Father Flanagan repeated, and he sighed again. It was his nephew's turn now to get up and assure himself with a glance round the room that everything was in readiness in case any one should come, for the tenth time opening the cabinet to inspect its contents, and then also

coming to the window to gaze out upon the street with a discouraged air. When the generous philanthropists whose money supported this crusade of hygiene and faith asked for an accounting, how would it be possible to make them understand that such expensive efforts could reasonably have such meager results? There had been one or two Norwegian sailors, Protestants, of course, who, when Father Flanagan insinuated with great regard for their feelings that the Catholic religion might, after all, be the best, fled abruptly, trailing after them the bandages of their unfinished dressings. And one or two Irishmen from Wapping, Catholics these, who came, with repeated professions of faith, to be treated for vague maladies, and ended by begging the wherewithal to go and drink to "the ould counthry." And Asiatics who, proudly proclaiming an earlier Evangelical conversion, stood aghast at learning that they had abandoned the faith of their fathers for another quite as false.

A wretched balance-sheet indeed, which might well have discouraged a faith less robust!

For the third time Father Flanagan sadly repeated, "There will be no one to-night, Timmy," and glued his forehead to the pane so as to see as far as possible down Limehouse Cause way, where numberless infidels were preparing to sleep in peace, confident

lamentable confidence, alas!-in the efficacy of their idols. In every one of the Chinese lodging-houses-seventeen of them-and behind the walls of Wang-Ho's restaurant and ChongChu's shop and even in Pennyfields, on the other side of West India Dock Road, there was scarcely a house that

did not serve as a refuge for the sons of the Middle Empire. During the day, when they wearied of seeking hire on the ships along the neighboring docks, they loafed about the street, played with the children in the gutters, or paid court to some white beauty. But now that night had come, one after another they drifted away to place a wall between themselves and the barbarians, each hoping to regain behind that shelter the atmosphere of his sacred land, and its boundless peace.

Father Flanagan's eyes followed intently the vague forms moving about in the gathering darkness of the streets. From time to time a door would open, throwing a pale glow on the walls opposite, and then close again. Every time one of these bright spaces made a rent in the darkness, momentarily sketching on roadway and walls a silhouette that was instantly effaced, he knew that one more unbeliever was escaping him for that night at least, and heaved a disconsolate sigh.

The sound of the door opening made him turn around. A woman had just come in. With his warmest smile of welcome, he moved forward, while his nephew settled himself at his table.

They gave the visitor a chair, and while the priest strove to set her at ease with words of kindly greeting, the doctor gently unwound the soiled bandages covering her injured hand. When he had examined the sore, he said softly, as to a child:

"It's nothing but an infected finger, a wee bit of an abscess. I'll have to hurt you a little, but it won't last long."

While he was lancing the swelling, Father Flanagan stood beside him, handing him bandages and vials, and smiling encouragingly at the patient, striving the while to guess who she was and where she came from. Not a Malay, no, or a Hindu, but too dark for a child of the Levant. Her black hair, fine, glossy with oil, with no trace of negro kinkiness, was hidden under a shawl that covered her shoulders and back, falling low on her fringed skirt; the beaded slippers she wore seemed to have lost in the mud of London all the sparkle and glitter of their early days. Yet she had not at all the beast-of-burden look common to many women of the Orient. Under her grimy clothing she retained a certain easy grace of bearing and movement, and the crushing oppression of the grim city, so harsh to the poor, had not yet been able to blot out the expression of her clear eyes or take away her ingenuous smile or humble the naïve vanity of a woman aware of her body's price.

When the sore finger had been treated and dressed, Father Flanagan poured out a glass of cordial, invited the patient to draw near the fire, and began to talk to her as a friend. She understood English very well, but spoke it haltingly, and once or twice used words that he asked her to repeat. Timmy was busy putting away his instruments, but he noted something curiously familiar in the strange syllables.

"Why, it's French!" he suddenly exclaimed, and the woman gave a lively nod.

Proudly she explained that she had been taught by French missionaries, had, indeed, been their best pupil. Her name? Taoufa. Catholic? Why, of

course. Roman Catholic. And she had learned how to sew and read, and sing in the choir-everything that a woman should know to become the equal of her white sisters, to be desired by young men, and finally to gain paradise (the paradise of the saints and angels, of course), she had learned with great diligence in the island of her birth, an island somewhere between Samoa and the Marquesas.

His hands on his knees, Father Flanagan, overjoyed, leaned toward her. In a lower tone he asked:

"You have n't neglected to practise your religion, I hope, since you left your country?"

She confessed quite simply that she had, a little; because, despite herself, she could n't somehow believe that the God of "out there" was really the God one needed here, where everything was so different. And she did not know where to go; she knew no one who could teach her.

Father Flanagan took one of her hands in his, and explained, very gently, half as a father confessor and half as a friend, that she had done wrong, that she had gravely compromised her salvation, and that, quite clearly, it was the hand of God which had that night led her to him. The very next day she must come back, and everything would be promptly set right.

She had listened with respect and even a trace of fear. To comfort her, he questioned her about the island where she was born. Was it a pleasant and fertile land, where life was good?

By way of answer, she drew a deep ecstatic sigh, and her hands made a strange gesture of tenderness. Trying

to describe that happy island, she was forced to stop at every word, hesitating, and to repeat again and again that one gesture that meant so much.

In truth, the island was fair and lovely, the pearl of the Pacific, a marvel that God kept jealously in a corner of the world, hiding it, one might say, from other peoples in order to keep it for his chosen children. Forests there were, heavy with perfume, the paths sunk deep in a luxuriant growth, and leading to crystalline springs. From a high hill, in every direction one could see the blue ocean lashing itself into foam. A girdle of coral surrounded the island, making for it a wide lagoon, as smooth as a leaf, where the fishing pirogas passed; its wide beaches, peopled with rosytinted crabs, were swept with soft breezes, the sands stretching in gentle slope from the very shade of the mango-trees down toward the transparent water, and here darted fish of every hue. And the women-how they sang in the woods! How radiant the bridal processions of young girls, singing as they passed, waving palms and flowers! And the sea! How warm the frothing waves from which one ran with great bursts of laughter to dry one's dripping limbs in the sun or to weave crowns of purple flowers that found new life in the freshly washed and freshly anointed hair they adorned!

Yes, the good father had read books about such lands as these, though not about the marvelous island she knew, to be sure.

The good fathers "out there," when they tried to make her comprehend some of the delights of paradise, always said it would be a great island, like her own, but even more beautiful,