My old nurse I implored to yield herself up to the Saviour, and I felt my results were very poor in her case because I only got affectionate caresses and smiles, and even observations about the holes in my clothes, in return. The fat butler (I assured him) was going headlong down the kitchen stairs to everlasting fire because he showed no symptoms of ecstasy when he met my pleadings with “O, I’m sure ’E died for me all right, Master Algie. I don’t feel a bit afraid!” But all this was genuine so far as I was concerned, and it lasted a considerable time, to my father’s great joy, though not so much, I think, to my mother’s. She read far deeper into things.... In a short time I came to look upon the whole phenomena of “conversion,” so far as my type of mind and character was concerned, with distrust and weariness. Only the very topmost layer of my personality was affected; evidently, there was no peace or happiness for me that way! None the less, I had one or two terrible moments; one (I was reading with a private tutor in Somerset for Edinburgh University) when I woke in the very early morning with a choking sensation in my throat, and thought I was going to die. It must have been merely acute indigestion, but I was convinced my last moment had come, and fell into a sweating agony of fear and weakness. I prayed as hard as ever I could, swearing to consecrate myself to God if He would pull me through. I even vowed I would become a missionary and work among the heathen, than which, I was always told, there was no higher type of manhood. But the pain and choking did not pass, and in despair I got up and swallowed half a bottle of pilules of aconite which my mother, an ardent homœopathist, always advised me to take after sneezing or cold shivers. They were sweet and very nice, and the pain certainly began to pass away, but only to leave me with a remorse that I had allowed a mere human medicine to accomplish naturally what God wished to accomplish by His grace. He had been so slow about it, however, that I felt also a kind of anger that He could torture me so long, and as it was the aconite that cured me, and not His grace, I was certainly released from my promise to become a missionary and work among the heathen. And for this small mercy I was duly thankful, though the escape had been a rather narrow one.