Each house is to him a nest of human birds, over which brood the eternal wings of love and purpose.

Only such different birds are hatched from the same nest! And what a nest was then the city itself!--with its university, its schools, its churches, its hospitals, its missions; its homes, its lodging-houses, its hotels, its drinking shops, its houses viler still; its factories, its ships, its great steamers; and the same humanity busy in all!--here the sickly lady walking in the panoply of love unharmed through the horrors of vicious suffering; there the strong mother cursing her own child along half a street with an intensity and vileness of execration unheard elsewhere! The will of the brooding spirit must be a grand one, indeed, to enclose so much of what cannot be its will, and turn all to its purpose of eternal good! Our knowledge of humanity, how much more our knowledge of the Father of it, is moving as yet but in the first elements.
In his shed under the stair it had been dark for some time--too dark for work, that is, and George Galbraith had lighted a candle: he never felt at liberty to leave off so long as a man was recognizable in the street by daylight.

But now at last, with a sigh of relief, he rose.

The hour of his redemption was come, the moment of it at hand.

Outwardly calm, he was within eager as a lover to reach Lucky Croale's back parlour.