Then he heard of a college student who was literally starving. Buchman wanted to invite him, too, to share what he had, but realised that he did not even have a spare bed. One of his young friends in the congregation soon resolved that problem. He told Buchman to buy a bed at Wanamaker's and let him have the bill.

It was the same young man, Gus Bechtold, who told Buchman of a boy he had seen in the tuberculosis ward of a local Home for the Indigent and Insane. The boy's father had just died of delirium tremens and his mother, who had once been cook to the Governor of Pennsylvania, was addicted to laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Mary Hemphill and her two boys were living in a tenement, of the type known as ‘three rooms straight up’, in one of the most squalid parts of Philadelphia - searching the garbage-bins for food. Buchman called on her and found her washing herself thin over the laundry-tub trying to make a living, a woman totally without hope. He needed a housekeeper, and invited her to join him along with her two boys.

Meeting this family made him decide to give up drinking alcohol. If Mary took a drop, she would return to her addiction; so he too must not touch it. The decision, a genuine sacrifice for one of his upbringing, lasted his lifetime.

Nor were the Hemphills the only poor family whom Buchman helped. ‘No one will ever know how much he did,’ said Bechtold later. ‘He was very close-mouthed about it. In all the years I knew Frank his first love was to serve the poor.’33

‘That work’, said Buchman afterwards, ‘was a fellowship in a store, where it was easier for workers and domestic help to gather together. It was literally the church in the house. Some walked miles because they felt the poor would find an understanding heart and ear, but also a home. With them I gladly shared my all and learnt the great truth that where God guides, He provides.’ Increasingly, he depended on gifts of food and money. Money was pushed through the letterbox, baskets of food left on the doorstep.

In May 1904 Buchman formally founded a Hospiz.34 By November his own warmth of heart, Mary's cooking and the insatiable need in the district, had filled the house.

Indeed, the Hospiz was almost too successful. It soon had more applicants than beds. The Church's Home Missions Board, however, were not slow on the uptake. Within weeks they were beginning to talk about opening a full-scale hospice, with room for fifty young men. Buchman was delighted. The local Ministerium consulted him fully and seemed only too happy to go along with the kind of institution he had in mind. He had no intention of setting up an austere hostel which merely offered basic amenities: he wanted something much closer in spirit to the Buchman House Hotel.

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