_A Kiss_.
The heat and smell in the narrow slum were worse than usual. A hot
Saturday night in midsummer is a bad time in the slums, and worse in the
slum public-houses. It was so on the night I speak of. In and out of the
suffocating bar the dirty stream of humanity came and went. Men who had
ceased long ago to be anything but beasts; women with tiny, white children
in their bony arms; boys and girls sipping the naphtha of perdition, and
talking the talk of fools; lewd and foul-mouthed women of the streets, all
hustled and jostled one another, and sang, and swore, and bandied horrid
words with the barmen--and, all the while, they drank, and drank, and
drank! The atmosphere grew thicker and thicker with the dust and
tobacco-smoke, and little by little the flaming gas-jets burnt up the
oxygen, till by midnight the place was all but unendurable.
Among the last to go was a woman of the town, who betook herself, with a
bottle of whisky, to a low lodging-house hard by. There she drank and
quarrelled with such vehemence that in the early hours of the morning the
"Deputy"--as the guardian of order is called in these houses--picked her
up and threw her into the gutter outside. There, amid the garbage from the
coster-mongers' barrows and the refuse of the town, this remnant of a
ruined woman lay in a half-drunken doze, until the golden sunlight mounted
over the city houses and pierced the sultry gloom on the Sabbath morning.
Another woman chanced that way. Young, beautiful alike in form and spirit,
and touched with the far-offness of many who walk with Christ, she
hastened to the early Sunday morning service, there to join her prayers
with others seeking strength to win the souls of men.
"What is that?" she asked her friend as they passed.
"That," replied the other, "is a drunken woman, unclean and outcast."
In a moment the Salvationist knelt upon the stones, and kissed the
battered face of the poor wanderer.
"Who is that--what did you do?" said the Magdalene. "Why did you kiss me?
_Nobody ever kissed me since my mother died_."
_It was the Christ_.
That kiss won a heart to Him.