ngs.

I looked around for E. E., who sat with her mouth half open, while sobs
came through her trembling lips.

"Oh, cousin, cousin, what shall I do? Have I really been regenerated, or
has the Lord sent me here this day to be made a new creature?"

I did not answer her; there was no chance for free thought or cool
reason in a crowd like that. In fact, I began to feel like a vile
sinner, myself, and as if being unregenerated was the duty of every
female woman every time a camp-meeting offered a good opportunity.
Seeing E. E. crying there as if her heart were breaking up, and both men
and women wild with joy or grief all around me, I just caved in, pulled
out my handkerchief, and sobbed with them, though what on earth we were
all crying about I couldn't have told to save my life.

The truth was, the more some women cried the more others shouted; and
when the meeting was over, everybody told everybody else what a
refreshing time they had experienced under Brother Inskip's preaching,
which was true as the Gospel, if tears refresh the soul as rain does the
earth.

LXXXIV.

EXPERIENCES.

After the preaching was done, the crowd broke up into sections and had a
half-dozen prayer-meetings and spontaneous love-feasts, where men and
women, and sometimes little children, got up and told all the strangers
within hearing how wicked they had been--with tears, and sobs, and
groans, that made one's heart ache. Still one and all of them seemed to
enjoy their own depravity and put themselves down as such horrible
sinners, that any amount of praying could not have dug them out of the
degradation into which they dived headforemost and seemed to revel in,
for a thousand years at least.

Everybody told his experience.

Among the rest, a young man from the Hub, slim as a beanpole and fiery
as a race-horse, prayed and shouted, and sung, and blazed away at the
crowd, like all possessed. His straight, black hair was parted down the
middle of his forehead, and his mustache rose and fell like fury as the
words of warning came like red-hot shot through his lips.

"Who is that?" says I to Cousin Dempster, who was listening with all his
heart.

"That," says he, "is Corbett, the young fellow who shot Wilkes Booth
through the crevices of the old barn in which he had taken shelter."

I shuddered all over, and I'm afraid the spirit of prayer had a shock.

That young man was about the last person I should have expected to see
prayi