To follow such a path is the way to find both the persons to help and the real modes of helping them. In fact, to be true to a man or woman in any way is to help him. He who goes out of common paths to look for opportunity leaves his own door and misses that of his neighbour. It is by following the paths we are in that we shall first reach somewhere. He who does this will find that his acquaintance widens and grows quickly. His heart will be full with the care of humanity, and his hands with its help. Such care will be death to one’s own cares, such help balm to one’s own wounds.

In a word, he must cultivate, in a simple human manner, the acquaintance of his neighbours. He must be a neighbour where a neighbour is needed. So shall he fulfill the part left behind of the work of the Master, which He desires to finish through him.

Of course I do not imagine that Hester understood all this. She had no theory toward the poor, and did not confine her hope of helping to the poor. There are as many in every other class needing help as among the poverty-stricken, and the need, although it wears different clothes, is essentially the same in all. To make the light go on in the heart of a rich man, if a more difficult task, is just as good a deed as to make it go on in the heart of a poor man. But with her strong desire to carry help where it was needed, and with her genuine feeling of the fundamental relationship between all human beings, Hester was in the right position to begin.

She went one morning into a small shop in Steven’s Road to buy a few sheets of music paper. The woman who kept the shop had been an acquaintance almost from the day they had moved to the neighbourhood. In the course of their talk, Mrs. Baldwin mentioned that she was anxious about a woman in the house who was not well and whom she thought Mrs. Raymount would be interested in.

“Mama is always ready to help when she can,” said Hester. “Tell me about her.”