Around the little newsboy huddled a group of street gamins, counting out
their few pennies, and talking excitedly of how they would buy him some
flowers. There were tear-stains down their grimy cheeks and it was plain
they were pitying him, they who had perhaps yet to tread the paths of
sin and deprivation and sorrow for many long years. And the Presence
there! So near them, with the pitying eyes! The young man knew the eyes
were pitying! If the children could only see! He felt an impulse to turn
back and tell them as he passed out into the street, yet how could he
make them understand--he who understood so feebly and intermittently
himself? He felt a great ache in himself to go out and shout to all the
world to look up and see the Presence that was in their midst, and they
saw Him not!
He was entirely aware that his present mental state would have seemed to
him little short of insanity twenty-four hours before; that it might
pass again as it had done before; and a kind of mental frenzy seized him
lest it would. He did not want to lose this assurance of One guiding
through a world that was so full of sorrow as this one had recently
revealed itself to him to be. And with the world-old anguished "Give me
a sign!" the cry of the soul reaching out to the unknown, he spoke aloud
once more: "God, if You are really there, let me find her!"
And yet if any had asked him just then if he ever prayed he would have
told them no.
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