e woods.

The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth looking at. A
spacious, irregularly defined clearing in the forest lay level as a
tennis-court, under the soft haze of autumn sunlight. In the centre was
a large, roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint, but
stained and weather-beaten with time. Behind it were some lines of
horse-sheds, and still further on in that direction, where the trees
began, the eye caught fragmentary glimpses of low roofs and the fronts
of tiny cottages, withdrawn from full view among the saplings and
underbrush. At the other side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents
were pitched, some gray and mended, others dazzlingly white in their
newness. The more remote of these tents fell into an orderly arrangement
of semi-circular form, facing that part of the engirdling woods where
the trees were largest, and their canopy of overhanging foliage was
lifted highest from the ground. Inside this half-ring of tents were many
rounded rows of benches, which followed in narrowing lines the idea of
an amphitheatre cut in two. In the centre, just under the edge of the
roof of boughs, rose a wooden pagoda, in form not unlike an open-air
stand for musicians. In front of this, and leading from it on the level
of its floor, there projected a platform, railed round with aggressively
rustic woodwork. The nearest benches came close about this platform.

At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough signs of
life about this encampment. The four or five hundred people who were in
constant residence were eating their dinners in the big boarding-house,
or the cottages or the tents. It was not the time of day for strangers.
Even when services were in progress by daylight, the regular attendants
did not make much of a show, huddled in a gray-black mass at the front
of the auditorium, by comparison with the great green and blue expanses
of nature about them.

The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the shadows gathered, big
clusters of kerosene torches, hung on the trees facing the audience were
lighted. The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights, and
the size and importance of what they illumined. The preacher, bending
forward over the rails of the platform, and fastening his eyes upon the
abashed faces of those on the "anxious seat" beneath him, borrowed an
effect of druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him, from
the flickering reflections on the