of such attacks in William became as familiar to me as
those of measles or whooping-cough. They were most apt to occur after
what may be called long spiritual exposures--a series of "revivals,"
for example. He was taken with the first one, I remember, during a six
weeks' protracted meeting at one of his churches on the first circuit.
We were spending the night with a family in the usual one-room log
cabin. We occupied the company bed while our host and hostess occupied
one in the opposite corner. By this time I had become resigned to this
close-communion hospitality and must have slept soundly. But some time
after midnight I was awakened by the deep groans of my husband.
Instantly I sat up in bed, and by the light of the moon through the
window I saw his face white and ghastly and covered with sweat as if he
were in mortal pain. His eyes were yawning at the dark with no real
light in them. And his mouth was drawn down into Jeremiah lines of woe
that are indescribable.

"William! William!" I cried aloud. "What is the matter?"

"Hush, Mary," in a tragic whisper, "don't awaken the Pratts. I have
lost the witness of the Spirit. I must close the meeting tomorrow,
just as the people are beginning to be interested. But it would be
blasphemy to go on preaching, feeling as I do!"

"How do you feel?" I whispered, thoroughly terrified.

"As if God had forsaken me!"

I had been in it long enough to know that the "witness of the Spirit"
is the hero of the Methodist itinerancy, that a preacher without it is
as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, that he is in a role of a
great play which has been rejected by the "star." I wiped the mourning
dew from William's brow, laid my face against his and wept in silent
sympathy. I saw something worse than disgrace staring us in the
face--William deprived of his definition, William just a man like other
men. I had come of a worldly-minded family who supported the church
and sustained a polite it somewhat distant relation to Heaven.
Religion was our relief like the Sabbath day, but it was never our
state of being. And I was blandly of the earth earthly, but I suddenly
discovered that the chief fascination of William for me was that he was
not of the earth earthly, that his dust was distressed and stirred by
strange spiritual instincts very different from anything I had ever
known. And probably nothing was further from the intention of
Providence when I was created than th