was half-past eleven. They announced
five minutes for silent meditation. Looking round, I saw my friend on
the left sitting with folded arms. He was obviously in no need of five
minutes.

In the Free Library I had renewed much of my ancient scientific reading,
and I used it now to control some slight emotional weakness, and to
explain it to myself. Half-starved, nay more than half-starved, as I
was, such weakness was likely; I was amenable to suggestion. I asked
myself a dozen crucial questions, and was bitterly amused to know how
the preacher would evade answering them if put to him. Such a creature
could not succeed, as all great teachers have done, in subduing the
intellect by the force of his own personality. But all the same the
hour, the time, and the song followed by silence, and the silence by
song, affected me and affected many. What had I to look forward to when
I went out into the street? And if I yielded they might, nay would, help
me to work. I laughed a little at myself, and was scornful of my
thoughts. They were singing again.

This time the band of women left the dais and in a body went slowly
round and round the aisle isolating the centre seats from the platform
and the sides. From the platform the preacher called on the others to
rise and join them, for it was nearly twelve o'clock, the New Year was
at hand. Most of the congregation obeyed him, I counted but fifteen or
twenty who refused.

The volume of the singing increased as the seats emptied, in it there
was religious fervour; it appealed strongly even to me. I saw some young
fellows rise and join the procession; perhaps three or four. There were
now less than twelve seated. The preacher spoke to us personally; he
insisted on the passing minutes of the dying year. And still the singers
passed us. Some leant over and called to us. Our bitter band lessened
one by one.

Then from the procession came these girl acolytes, and, dividing
themselves, they appealed to us and prayed. They were not beautiful
perhaps, but they were women. We outcasts of the prairie and the camp
fire and the streets had been greatly divorced from feminine sweet
influences, and these succeeded where speech and prayer and song had
failed. As one spoke to me I saw hard resolution wither in many. What
woman had spoken kindly to them in this hard land since they left their
eastern homes? Why should they pain them? And as they joined the singing
band of believers the girls came