It was an August evening, sultry and smoky. Forest fires had been burning for a week on the wooded side of the harbor, and the air was thick. It was Sunday, and the streets and wharves and beaches of Windover surged with vacuous eyes and irritable passions. The lock-ups were full, the saloons overflowed. The ribald song and excessive oath of the coast swept up and down like air currents. There had been several accidents and some fights. Rum ran in streams. It was one of the stifling evenings when the most decent tenement retains only the sick or the helpless, and when the occupants of questionable sailors’ boarding-houses and nameless dens crawl out like vermin fleeing from fire. It was one of the nights when the souls of women go to perdition, and when men do not argue with their vices. It was one of the nights when ease and cool, luxury and delicacy, forget the gehenna that they escape; and when only the strong few remember the weakness of the many. Upon the long beach of fine white sand which spanned the space between the docks and the cliffs of the wooded coast, there gathered that evening a large and unusual crowd. Angel Alley was there en masse. The wharves poured out a mighty delegation. Dories put out from anchored vessels whose prows nodded in the inner harbor, and their crews swarmed to the beach in schools, like fish to a net. A few citizens of another sort, moved, one might say, from curiosity, innocent or malicious, joined themselves to the fishermen and sailors. Their numbers were increased by certain of the summer people from the Point, drawn from their piazzas and their hammocks by rumors of a sensation. An out-of-door service, said to be the first of its kind conducted by the remarkable young preacher of such excellent family and such eccentric career, was not without its attractions even on the hottest evening of the season. There might have been easily eight hundred or a thousand people facing the light temporary desk or pulpit which had been erected at the head of the beach for the speaker’s use. The hour was early, and it would have been very light but for the smoke in the air, through which the sun hung, quivering and sinister, with the malevolent blood-red color of drought and blasting heat. “Statira,” in a low tone said the puzzled voice of the Professor of Theology, “this is--I must say--really, a most extraordinary gathering. It quite impresses me.” “I have read something somewhere it reminds me of,” mused Mrs. Carruth, with a knot between her placid brows. “Where was it, Haggai?--Helen! Helen! What have I read that is like this? I can’t think whether it is George Eliot, or Fox’s Book of Martyrs. Perhaps it is the Memoirs of Whitefield; but certainly”-- “Possibly,” suggested Helen, “it may have been the New Testament.” “That’s it! You have it!” cried Mrs. Carruth, with mild relief. “That’s the very thing. How extraordinary! It _is_ the New Testament I have got into my head.”