[Illustration: CLUB WITH WHICH A FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILD WAS BRUTALLY BEATEN.]
The last echoes of the storm raised by the story of little Mary Ellen had not died in the Pennsylvania hills when a young clergyman in the obscure village of Sherman preached to his congregation one Sunday morning from the text, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me," a sermon which in its far-reaching effects was to become one of the strongest links in the chain of remorseful human sympathy then being forged in the fires of public indignation. Willard Parsons was a man with a practical mind as well as an open heart. He had lived in the city and had witnessed the suffering of the poor children in the stony streets on the hot summer days. Out there in the country he saw the wild strawberry redden the fields in June only to be trampled down by the cattle, saw, as the summer wore on, the blackberry-vines by the wayside groaning under their burden of sweet fruit, unconsidered and going to waste, with this starved host scarce a day's journey away. Starved in body, in mind, and in soul! Not for them was the robin's song _they_ scarcely heard; not for them the summer fields or the cool forest shade, the sweet smell of briar and fern. Theirs was poverty and want, and heat and suffering and death--death as the entrance to a life for which the slum had been their only preparation. And such a preparation!
All this the young preacher put in his sermon, and as he saw the love that went out from his own full heart kindling in the eager faces of his listeners, he told them what had been in his mind on many a lonely walk through those fields: that while the flowers and the brook and the trees might not be taken to the great prison-pen where the children were, these might be brought out to enjoy them there. There was no reason why it should not be done, even though it had not been before. If they were poor and friendless and starved, yet there had been One even poorer, more friendless than they. They at least had their slum. He had not where to lay his head. Well they might, in receiving the children into their homes, be entertaining angels unawares. "Inasmuch as ye did it unto even the least of these, ye did it unto Me."