How crestfallen we all looked, the boys whittling the canes, and the other girls probably seeing in ours a fate similar to their own! We got a vigorous talking-to before we were sent to bed. Our uncle, it seems, had alarmed Mother by saying that we were lounging under the willows with a “lot of strange fellows.” This was a favourite trysting-place for the young people whose devotion led them into these by-paths rather than to the evening meetings. I can laugh now at our discomfiture and at Mother’s wrath, but it was no laughing matter that August night so long ago. I don’t know how old I was when I “experienced religion.” Reared from infancy “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,” there had been, during childhood, a period of apparent indifference to such matters; later one of acute interest; then the lull and reaction from the excitement of a revival; then one of renewed and deepened interest, followed by a gradual decline in religious observances, a creeping in of doubt and unbelief; a period of acute suffering, extending probably over three or four years (because I could no longer walk in the old paths); then one of lonely wanderings in strange paths, till I finally settled down to where I now find myself, though that state would be hard to define. Of the length of these various periods, and the age at which some of them occurred, I am uncertain. I was perhaps fifteen When I first became “converted.” There had been premonitory symptoms a year or two before, at Auburndale, but the real attack came one winter during a prolonged revival. Many of the boys and girls “went forward” long before I did. Steeling my heart I stayed at home and applied myself to my studies with increased zeal, for Professor Durland, a Baptist, less carried away by the revival than many others, although attending the meetings occasionally, had talked wisely in school about religion, urging us to be temperate in frequenting the meetings. He reminded us that all this emotion was not religion, and that it was our duty as students to let nothing interfere with our studies. I was impressed by what he said, but this religious wave was sweeping over the town, and was hard to withstand. Two young evangelists were there with gospel hymns, moving prayers, and engaging ways of leading souls to the Lord. Every night witnessed the conversion of sinners who, having groaned under the burden of the conviction of sin, finally sought salvation.