It was a cold winter morning. A recent snowfall covered the ground; an icy wind whipped across the wide boulevard, cutting the face of the man pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. He was engaged on his usual Saturday morning occupation, a rosary vigil at an abortion clinic. This clinic, the Northeast (Philadelphia) Women's Center, was on the third floor of the small office building where it had begun operations, very quietly, a year and a half ago. Since then, he had spent several hours every Saturday praying the rosary for the unborn babies being brought in to be killed. He prayed too for their mothers; usually frightened young girls. He had tried and tried to interest others in coming to the vigils. Sometimes he was successful and two, three, four people would join him, but all too often, as on this Saturday, he was alone. The loneliness, and even more the apathy, the heartlessness of his fellow Catholics, his fellow Christians, was beginning to wear him down. As he walked back and forth, fingering his beads, frozen to the bone, he wondered if it was all worthwhile, if anybody cared, if his efforts really made a difference. This morning in particular, an almost unbearable sense of defeat and depression weighed him down. Fighting it, he knelt in the snow on the lawn between the building and the sidewalk to say his next rosary. He hoped that somehow this added bit of hardship would help, and oddly enough it did. After finishing his rosary, he arose with a lighter heart. He completed his vigil that day and went on to continue them for many years thereafter. What he didn't know was that as he knelt there in the snow praying, a young woman watched from a window on the third floor. She was waiting to be brought into the procedure room for her abortion. Sad to relate, she did have the abortion that day. And, as is often the case, she found herself pregnant again a few months later. Once more she faced an agonising decision. The memory of that day at the clinic came back to her; she could not forget the sight of that lone man kneeling in the snow praying for her and her baby. She decided that if a stranger could care that much her baby so could she. She would let the baby live. That day, by his presence and the simple act of kneeling in prayer, he had saved a child's life...and he didn't even know. (Twelve years later the pro-Life counsellor to whom this woman turned, told her half of this story to Joe Wall on a radio programme. He did not need to be told the man's story - he was the man.)