e had private and secret prayer again before dinner;--some
clambering into thick trees to be hid, but forgetting in their
simplicity, that they were heard and betrayed. But religious devotion
excuses all errors and mistakes.

5. The afternoon sermon with its bob-tail string of exhortations.

6. Private and family prayer about tea time.

7. But lastly, we had what was termed "a precious season," in the third
regular service at the _principia_ of the camp. This season began not
long after tea and was kept up long after I left the ground; which was
about midnight. And now sermon after sermon and exhortation after
exhortation followed like shallow, foaming, roaring waters; till the
speakers were exhausted and the assembly became an uneasy and billowy
mass, now hushing to a sobbing quiescence, and now rousing by the groans
of sinners and the triumphant cries of folks that had "jist got
religion"; and then again subsiding to a buzzy state, occasioned by the
whimpering and whining voices of persons giving spiritual advice and
comfort! How like a volcanic crater after the evomition of its lava in a
fit of burning cholic, and striving to resettle its angry and
tumultuating stomach!

It is time, however, to speak of the three grand services and their
concomitants, and to introduce several master spirits of the camp.

Our first character, is the Reverend Elder Sprightly. This gentleman was
of good natural parts; and in a better school of intellectual discipline
and more fortunate circumstances, he must have become a worthy minister
of some more tasteful, literary and evangelical sect. As it was, he had
only become what he never got beyond--"a very smart man;" and his aim
had become one--to enlarge his own people. And in this work, so great
was his success, that, to use his own modest boastfulness in his sermon
to-day,--"although folks said when he came to the Purchase that a single
corn-crib would hold his people, yet, bless the Lord, they had kept
spreading and spreading till all the corn-cribs in Egypt weren't big
enough to hold them!"

He was very happy at repartee, as Robert Dale Owen well knows; and not
"slow" (inexpert) in the arts of "taking off"--and--"giving them their
own." This trait we shall illustrate by an instance.

Mr. Sprightly was, by accident, once present where a Campbellite
Baptist, that had recently taken out a right for administering six doses
of lobelia, red pepper and steam to men's bodies, and a pl