One Sunday afternoon when I was rallying a congregation in the bunk-house, I found him on his cot, reading the life of Buffalo Bill.  I invited him down to the meeting, but he politely refused, saying that he was an Episcopalian.  The following Sunday he did come, and his was the most striking spiritual crisis that I had ever seen.  His conversion was clean-cut, definite and clear; it was of a kind with the conversion of Paul on the way to Damascus.  He was an exceedingly intelligent man, and could repeat more classic poetry by heart than any man I have ever known.  He came out from that brown mass of human flotsam and jetsam on the Sunday afternoon following his conversion, and told them what had happened to him.

The lodgers were very much impressed.  It was in the winter-time.  The old man earned very little money at his new trade, but what he had he shared with his fellow-lodgers.  The bouncer told me that the old tinker would buy a stale loaf for a few cents, then in the dormitory he would make coffee in tomato cans and gather half a dozen of the hungriest around him, and share his meal with them—­plain bread soaked in unsweetened coffee.  Sometimes he would read a few verses of the Bible to them, and sometimes merely say in his clear Irish voice:  “There, now, God bliss ye!”

[Illustration:  Dowling, Tinker and Colporter.  A Veteran who Served in India under Havelock and Colin Campbell]

At this time he was living on a dollar a week, but every morning he had his little tea-party around the old stove, his word of greeting, and his final word of benediction to the men he had selected to share in his bounty as they slunk out of the bunk-house to begin the day.

Later, he had a large-type New Testament out of which he read a verse or two every morning at the meal.  Very soon the three hundred lodgers began to look upon him with a kind of awe.  This was not because he had undergone a radical change, for he had always been quiet, gentle and civil; but because he had found his voice, and that voice was bringing to them something they could not get elsewhere—­sympathy, cheer and courage.

In the tenement region, particularly in the little back alleys around Mulberry Street, he mended pots, kettles, pans and umbrellas—­not always for money, but as often for the privilege of reading to these people messages of comfort out of his large-type New Testament.

Going down Mulberry Street one morning in the depth of winter, I happened to glance up one of those narrow alleys in “the Bend,” and I noticed my friend standing at a window, his face close to a broken pane of glass and his large New Testament held in front of him a few inches from his face.  His tinker’s budget was by his feet.  The door was closed.  In a few minutes he closed the book, put it into his kit, and as he moved away from the window, I saw a large bundle of rags pushed into the hole.

“What have you been doing?” I inquired.