daverous
cheeks, deep-set and beady eyes--vermin-covered, disease-devoured,
hope-deserted. They clung around him, these concentric circles of
humanity, like rings around a luminous planet, held by they knew not
what resistless attraction.

The simple melody, borne upon the pinions of that resonant and
cello-like voice, attained an almost supernatural influence over their
perverted natures. When it ceased, an audible sigh arose, an involuntary
tribute of adoration and of awe.

As soon as he had finished his hymn, this consecrated apostle to the
lost sheep of the great city opened a well-worn volume.

The passage which he read, or rather chanted, was the fifty-third
chapter of Isaiah, the awe-inspiring sentences sending through the
circles of humanity which were tightening about him visible vibrations.

When he finished his reading, he began an address full of homely wit and
pathos, in which, with all the rich and striking imagery culled from a
varied life in the wildernesses of the great forests and the great
cities of our continent, he appealed to that consciousness of "the true,
the beautiful and the good" which he believed to lie dormant, but
capable of resurrection, in the soul of every man.

A few of his auditors were too far gone with fatigue or intoxication to
follow him, and elbowing their way through the crowd shot off into the
night upon their various tangents of stupidity or crime; but most of the
spectators listened with a sort of rapt and involuntary attention.

The influence which he exerted over the mind of the young man whom he
had unconsciously saved from suicide was as irresistible as it was
inscrutable. His language had the charm of perfect familiarity. Every
word and phrase had fallen from his own lips a hundred times in similar
exhortations. In fact, they seemed to him strangely like the echo of his
own voice coming back upon him from the dim and half-forgotten past.

His interest and excitement culminated in an incident for which the
listener was totally unprepared. The speaker who had been exhorting his
audience upon the testimony of prophet and apostle now appealed to his
own personal experience.

"Look at me!" he said, laying his great hand on his broad chest. "I was
once as hardened and desperate a man as any of you; but God saved me!
See this book!" he added, holding up the old volume. "I will tell you a
story about it. I found it in a log cabin away out in the frontier state
of Ohio.