were most concerned
walked up the aisle and expressed a desire to lead a new life.

"Do it now," I suggested.

"Right here?"

"Yes, right where you stand."

The president and faculty gathered around him, making a circle; he
stood in the midst, alone, and in that way with prayer and dedication
from the lips of the young man and his friends began one of the most
useful lives in the American ministry. This young man became an
ascetic. I gave him to read the life of Francis of Assisi, and he went
to the extreme in emulation. He divested himself of collars and ties
and on graduating read his thesis for his Bachelor's degree collarless
and tieless.

I was in New Haven when he came there to take his Divinity degree in
Yale. He came without either collar or tie, but after days of prayer
and fasting he was "led" to enter the University as others entered it.
He is now pastor of the First Congregational Church in Rockford,
Illinois; his name is Frank M. Sheldon. Nine men have gone by a
similar route into the ministry, but Mr. Sheldon is the only one of
them who has kept touch with the modern demands on religious
leadership.

Birthdays have meant nothing whatever to me, but I made my
thirty-second an occasion for a party on "the bottoms."

I could only accommodate seven guests. Two were favourite boys and the
others were selected because of their great need. The hut was the
centre of a mud puddle that January morning. I got a long plank and
laid it from my doorstep to the edge of the clay bank. I took
precaution not to announce the affair, even to the guests, but a
grocer's boy who had been sent by a friend with some oranges lost his
way and his inquiry after me created such a sensation that when he
found me he was accompanied by about fifty children.

Old Mrs. Belgarde, my nearest neighbour, had whispered across the
fence to her neighbour that something was sure to happen, for she had
noticed me making unusual preparations that day. I think the origin
of the party idea came with my first birthday gift--I mean the first I
had ever received--it was a copy of Thomas a Kempis, given me by my
friend the Reverend Gregory J. Powell. [I gave it later to a man who
was to die by judicial process in the county jail.]

When the hour arrived a crowd of two hundred youngsters stood in the
mud outside. On the top of the clay bank stood parents, crossing
themselves and praying quietly that their offspring would be lucky
enough to get