nd gaunt, with long gray
hair and wild eyes, was speaking at the full pitch of his voice.
Another was emphasizing his words with loud hallelujahs. Then the
third dropped down on his knees in the road, and prayed with
earnestness in a voice that rang along the village street--silent
to-day, save for him--and echoed back and back. Before the prayer had
quite ended a hymn was begun in a jaunting measure, with a chorus that
danced to a spirit of joyfulness.

Then came another exhortation. It was heavy with gloomy prediction.
The world was full of oppression, and envy, and drunkenness, and vain
pleasures. Men had forsaken the light that should enlighten all men.
They were full of deceit and vanities. They put their trust in priests
and professors who were but empty hollow casks. "Yet the Lord is at
hand," cried the preacher, "to thrash the mountains, and beat them to
dust."

Another hymn followed, more jubilant than before. One by one the
people around caught the contagion of excitement. There were old men
there with haggard faces that told of the long hard fight with the
world in which they were of the multitude of the vanquished; old
women, too, jaded and tired, and ready to slip into oblivion, their
long day's duty done; mothers with babes in their arms and young
children nestling close at their sides; rollicking boys and girls as
well, with all the struggle of life in front of them.

The simple Quaker hymn told of a great home of rest far away, yet very
near.

The tumult had attracted the frequenters of the Red Lion, and some of
these had stepped out on to the causeway. Two or three of them were
already drunk. Among them was Garth, the blacksmith. He laughed
frantically, and shrieked and crowed at every address and every hymn.
When the preachers shouted "Hallelujah," he shouted "Hallelujah" also;
shouted again and again, in season and out of season; shouted until he
was hoarse, and the perspiration poured down his crimsoning face. His
tipsy companions at first assisted him with noisy cheers. When one of
the men in the ring lifted up his voice in the ardor of prayer, Garth
yelled out yet louder to ask if he thought God Almighty was deaf.

The people began to tremble at the blacksmith's blasphemies. The
tipsiest of his fellows slunk away from his side.

The preacher spoke at one moment of the numbers of their following.

"You carry a bottle of liquor somewhere," cried Garth; "that's why
they follow you."

Wearie