of passion, sharply punctuated with
double shots, and falling abruptly to heavy silence. Gordon saw men
obscurely running below.

The curtained entrance to the tent was pushed aside, and a woman walked
stiffly out, her hands clenched, and her glassy eyes set in a fixed stare.
Her hat was gone, and her grey hair lay upon one shoulder. She progressed,
stumbling blindly over the inequalities of the ground, until she tripped
on a stone. She lay where she had fallen, with her muscles jerking and
shuddering, until a man appeared from behind the counter, and dragged her
unceremoniously to the women's shelter.

Gordon entered the tent where the service was in progress. A subdued light
filtered through the canvas upon a horde that filled every foot of space;
they sat pressed together on long, rough boards nailed together in the
semblance of benches. On a platform at the farther side a row of men and
women sat against the canvas wall; to their left a folding organ had been
erected, and was presided over by a man with a blurred, greyish
countenance; while, standing at the forefront of the platform, a large,
heavy man in a black frock coat was addressing the assemblage. He had a
round, pallid, smooth face with long, black hair brushed back upon his
coat collar, and great, soft, white hands.

"... it's rising," he proclaimed, in a loud, sing-song voice, "the flood
is rising; now it's about your pockets--praise God! now it's above your
waists. It's rising! it's rising! Hallelujah! the sea of redemption is
rising," his voice rose with the figurative flood. "At last it's about
your hearts, your hearts are immersed in the Sacred Tide."

A man beside Gordon groaned and dropped upon his knees. A woman cried,
"God! God! God!" A spindling, overgrown boy rose fumbling at his throat.
"I can't breathe," he choked, "I can't--" His face grew purplish,
congested. The tumult swelled, directed, dominated, by the voice of the
revivalist. He dropped upon his knees, and, amid the sobbing silence, pled
with an invisible Judge hovering, apparently, over a decision to destroy
at one bloody blow the recalcitrant peoples of the earth, the peoples of
His making.

"Spare us," he implored; "spare us, the sheep of hell; lead us to Thy
shining pasture ... still water; lead us from the great fire of the
eternal pit, from the boiling bodies of the unsaved...."

Gordon Makimmon indifferently regarded the clamor. The process of "getting
religion" was familiar