THIS is something as Miss Agnes Hedenstrom looked when she was eight
years old, and living among her wealthy relatives in Upsala. She was an
orphan, petted by everybody and allowed to have her own way.
Thus she grew up, apparently a spoiled child.
She was not happy, however, though indulged with whatever she wished.
She felt the need of something else.
[Illustration: WHEN SHE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD.]
One day she heard a Swedish minister preach, and soon after Agnes gave
her heart to Jesus. Strangely enough, she began herself to preach to
her people, now in schoolhouses, now in great halls.
Often she would address on the streets of London great crowds of the
worst sort of people.
For years she thus toiled on among the wretched and wicked and
dangerous people who infested East London.
Once she was speaking alone in an awful place to twenty drunken
sailors while they yelled and blasphemed. Still she continued as best
she could to tell them the wondrous story of redeeming love. Think of
the "spoiled Agnes" coming to be such a brave, true woman! She still
shudders to remember those awful moments when she did not know but
those wretches would tear her to pieces. They did not. They became
quiet and subdued. The next evening they came, bringing some of their
comrades with them.
Then came a lecture room by her efforts; then a larger one. A few years
ago Miss Agnes went among the good people of London and told them about
the wretched people among whom she was laboring, especially the wicked
sailors.
They gave her money to build a Home for sailors, when they come on
shore without friends and an army of saloons to tempt them to drink and
waste all their earnings in "riotous living."
Well, after waiting some months for the builders to finish the work,
she clapped her hands--not on her guitar as when she was a child--but
_together_ as she walked through this Home.
She is sole manager of the sailors' boarding-house. There she sees that
the beds are clean and the meals good. She has books and papers, and
best of all, her dear Master Jesus in this Home.
More than a thousand sailors are thought to have been saved from their
awfully wicked ways through this wonderful Agnes Hedenstrom.
Some one has said that God can thresh a mountain with a worm. Would not
you like to be the worm in his hand?