He took a grand text: “And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath He reconciled, in the body of His flesh, through death, to present you holy, and unblamable, and unreprovable in His sight.” Old men used to describe afterwards how he justified their first fears by his stiff, awkward movements; but the organ was, in those first moments, building, and soon it began to play. He showed himself a master of the instrument of speech. Closer and closer the audience began to gather near him. They got up, and came in from the hedges. The crowd grew more and more dense with eager listeners; the sermon became alive with dramatic representation. The throng of preachers present confessed that they were dazzled with the brilliance of the language, and the imagery, falling from the lips of this altogether unknown and unexpected young prophet. Presently, beneath some appalling stroke of words, numbers started to their feet; and in the pauses—if pauses were permitted in the paragraphs—the question went, “Who is this? who have we here?” His words went rocking to and fro; he had caught the “_hwyl_,”—he had also caught the people in it; he went swelling along at full sail. The people began to cry, “_Gogoniant_!” (Glory!) “_Bendigedig_!” (Blessed!) The excitement was at its highest when, amidst the weeping, and rejoicing of the mighty multitude, the preacher came to an end. Drawn together from all parts of Wales to the meeting, when they went their separate ways home they carried the memory of “the one-eyed lad” with them. Christmas Evans was, from that moment, one of the most famous preachers in the Principality. Lord Byron tells us how he woke up one morning and found himself famous. In those days, a new great Welsh preacher was quite as famous a birth in the little country of Wales as the most famous reputation could be in the literary world of England.