arts of the grounds during the
entire meeting, which lasted over a week.

This southern Kentucky revival was followed by others of a like nature
throughout other portions of the State, and like a wind-driven fire
through the dried grass of a prairie was the effect of such meetings.
In the prevalence of this excitement, sectarianism, abashed, shrank
away, and the people, irrespective of creed, united in the services.

It was decided to hold a camp-meeting at Cane Ridge. The woodland slope
surrounding the meeting-house was cleared of its thick undergrowth for
a space of several hundred yards, and three-fourths of this space was
soon covered with long rows of log seats with broad aisles between the
rows. In front, a spacious platform was erected, and over all was a
roof of loose boughs supported by posts.

The meeting began Thursday night before the third Sunday in August.
Before sunrise on that Thursday, the roads were thronged with
carriages, wagons, ox-carts, horseback riders, and persons on foot, all
moving toward the woodland rendezvous. Many came from distant parts of
Kentucky; many from the neighboring States. A Revolutionary officer,
skilled in estimating large encampments, declared that the crowd
numbered between twenty-five and thirty thousand people.

Enthusiasm gathered intensity with each succeeding hour. There was no
fixed time for intermission. Each family cooked, ate, slept at any time
its members chose, and returned to the services, which began at sunrise
and continued until long after midnight. Sometimes several preachers
were each exhorting a large audience in different parts of the ground
at the same time, while singing, shouting, praying and groaning were
the constant accompaniment of the fervid, chantlike exhortations.

At night the vast encampment, illuminated by scores of bear-grease
lamps, hundreds of rush-lights, and thousands of tallow dips, presented
a spectacle of weird sublimity. In the improvised auditorium lights
suspended from overhanging boughs fell upon a concourse of earnest
worshipers whose voices, rising in the solemn melody of a hymn, mingled
with the fervid petitions of the preacher, the shouts of the newly
converted, the sobs and shrieks of the newly convicted. Pine knots set
in sockets upon the rostrum revealed in unearthly radiance the face of
some impassioned speaker, silhouetting his form with startling
distinctness against a background of forest. In the shadowy depths
beyo