thout quite knowing what could
possibly come of all that. And the telegram gave him an excuse to speak
in another vein. You must remember that up to now he had been wholly
local in his League interests. He had gone to no conventions, he was not
a reader of _The Epworth Herald_, and to him the Central Office was as
though it had not been.

"I wonder if anybody else feels as I do," he said, "about this League of
ours? Until this last week I never thought much about it. But we've just
heard that telegram from an Institute bigger than this, a thousand miles
off. And there's fifty-five or sixty Institutes going on this year,
besides the winter Institutes, the conventions, and all the other
gatherings. We seem to belong to a movement that enrolls almost a
million young people, with all sorts of chances to learn how it can do
all sorts of Christian work by actually _doing_ it. This isn't the only
thing I've found out here, but it makes me want to see the whole League
become as good as it is big. I don't want to be dazzled by the size of
it, because I know how many other members are just as little use as I've
been. Only when I get home I hope I'm going to be a different sort of an
Epworthian, and I can't help wishing that we all felt that way about
being more good in the League. We can make it a hundred times more
useful to the church and to our Master."

Many others spoke like that, some of them because they could find
nothing more intimate to say, some here and there those who, like J.W.,
could not quite trust themselves yet to talk of their deeper personal
experiences.

And then Joe Carbrook arose. He spoke easily, as Joe always did, but it
was a new Joe Carbrook, and only the Delafield delegation understood how
amazing was the change.

"This Institute has made me all sorts of trouble," he said. "I had
nothing else to do, and without caring anything about it, except to get
some new fun out of it, I came along, intending to stir up some of you
if I could, and I knew I could. But I've seen what a fool I was. Every
day I've seen that a little more distinctly. And last night, just as I
was leaving one of the boys after the camp fire he said something about
what I might do with my life. I don't know how seriously he meant it.
Maybe he doesn't, either. I went off without answering him. There wasn't
any answer, except that I knew I wasn't fit even to think about it. And
then, thank God, I met a man who understood what was wrong