nized a
company from the men of his congregation, and marched out and whipped
the British; and then he went back to the church and finished his
sermon.' Says he, 'My boys can't help fighting like their mother's
grandfather any more than they can help having their mother's eyes and
hair.'

"Now here I am talkin' about Martin Luther Wilson's great-grandfather
when I started out to tell you about the old church. Le's see if I
can't git back to the straight road and keep on it the rest of the
way.

"When Brother Wilson first come, the Presbyterian church was in the
old graveyard in the lower part o' town. Maybe you ricollect seem' it
the day we went to town. Mighty dismal-lookin' place, all grown up in
weeds and underbrush. And he took a look at it and saw jest how things
was, and says he, 'You've got your church in the right place. A dead
church,' says he, 'ought to be in a graveyard. But,' says he, 'when
the spirit of the Lord breathes over this valley of dry bones, I
expect to see the dead arise, and we'll build a house of the Lord
amongst the habitations of the living.' And bless your life, he went
to work and got up a revival that lasted three months, and spread to
all the churches--the Babtist and the Methodist and the
Christian--till every sinner in town was either converted or at the
mourners' bench. And before it was over in town, it started in the
country churches and kept up till Sam Amos said it looked to him like
the preachers would have to go out o' business for a while or move to
some other place, for there wasn't any material in the county for 'em
to work on. Mother used to say it was pretty near equal to the big
revival they had 'way back yonder in 1830. She said every seat in a
church then was a mourners' bench, and such shoutin' and singin' and
prayin' never was heard before or since. Some o' the converts would
fall in trances, and you couldn't tell whether they was dead or alive.
Uncle Jim Matthews's father, Job Matthews, stayed in a trance for two
days and nights, and mother said he never seemed like the same man
after that. He never could tell what he'd seen when he was in the
trance, and when folks'd question him about it, a sort of a wild
look'd come into the old man's eyes and he'd say, 'I've seen things of
which it is not lawful for me to speak.' He didn't take any more
interest in his farmin' or the family affairs, and when his wife'd try
to stir him up and persuade him to work like he'd been u