"I'll be able to work so much better." One rainy day, as Edward was coming up from Fulton Ferry with Mr.
Beecher, they met an old woman soaked with the rain.

"Here, you take this, my good woman," said the clergyman, putting his umbrella over her head and thrusting the handle into the astonished woman's hand.

"Let's get into this," he said to Edward simply, as he hailed a passing car.
"There is a good deal of fraud about beggars," he remarked as he waved a sot away from him one day; "but that doesn't apply to women and children," he added; and he never passed such mendicants without stopping.

All the stories about their being tools in the hands of accomplices failed to convince him.

"They're women and children," he would say, and that settled it for him.
"What's the matter, son?
Stuck ?" he said once to a newsboy who was crying with a heavy bundle of papers under his arm.
"Come along with me, then," said Mr.Beecher, taking the boy's hand and leading him into the newspaper office a few doors up the street.
"This boy is stuck," he simply said to the man behind the counter.
"Guess _The Eagle_ can stand it better than this boy; don't you think so ?" To the grown man Mr.Beecher rarely gave charity.
He believed in a return for his alms.
"Why don't you go to work ?" he asked of a man who approached him one day in the street.
"Can't find any," said the man.
"Looked hard for it ?" was the next question.
"I have," and the man looked Mr.Beecher in the eye.
"Want some ?" asked Mr.Beecher.
"I do," said the man.
"Come with me," said the preacher.