Not a bad counterbalance for what I was gathering in the town below the farm on the hill and seeing reproduced in the _Police Gazette_, which so perfectly pictured its activities. But there were other correcting forces at work on me. The men who formed the vigilante committee to make Rouseville difficult for commercialized vice (my father one of them) set themselves early to establishing civilizing agencies—first a church. It was decided by the men and women who were to build and support this church that it should be of the denomination of which there were the largest number in the community. The Methodists had the numbers, and so my father and mother who were Presbyterians became and remained Methodists. Their support was active. We did not merely go to church; we stayed to class meeting; we went to Sunday school, where both father and mother had classes; we went to Wednesday night—or was it Thursday night?—prayer meeting. And when there was a revival we went every night. In my tenth or eleventh year I “went forward” not from a sense of guilt but because everybody else was doing it. My sense of sin came after it was all over and I was tucked away in bed at night. I had been keenly conscious as I knelt at the Mourners’ bench that the long crimson ribbons which hung from my hat must look beautiful on my cream-colored coat. The realization of that hypocrisy cut me to the heart. I knew myself a sinner then, and the relief I sought in prayer was genuine. I never confessed. It wasn’t the kind of sin other converts talked about. But it aroused self-observation; I learned that often when I was saying the polite or proper thing I was thinking quite differently. For a long time it made me secretly unhappy thinking that in me alone ran an underground river of thought. Later I began to suspect that other people were like this, that always there flowed a stream of unspoken thought under the spoken thought. It made me wary of strangers. A side of my life which moves me deeply now, as I think back, was the continuous effort of my father and mother to give me what were called advantages, to use their increasing income to awaken and develop in me a taste for things which they had always been denied. They wanted music in the household and our grandest possession became a splendid Bradbury square piano—a really noble instrument—with one of the finest, mellowest tones that I have ever heard in a piano. A music teacher turned up in the community and I was at once set at five-finger exercises, and I was kept at them and all that follows them for many years; but I found no joy in what I was doing. It is possible that with different teachers from those available there might have been a spring touched, for untrained as I am I am not without a certain appreciation of music.