Feeling thereby unaccountably stronger, and endued with a sort of moral authority as if he had just taken Holy Orders because of the carnation which bloomed so chastely white upon his breast, John squared his shoulders and mounted into the pulpit. There was something that God wanted to say to these people, and he accepted the situation as an obvious call to him to say it, but when he essayed to speak, awe came upon him, as it had a while before. "Brethren," he confessed humbly, in a voice barely audible to all, "I am not a preacher. I haven’t got any text, and I don’t know what to say, except just perhaps to tell you how I happened to be here this morning." Then he told them simply and unaffectedly but with unconscious eloquence how he happened to see the church nailed up and how it sounded like the echo of the blows upon the cross; how, this morning, with a sad ache in his own heart, the thought of the faith of little children disturbed by that brutal plank upon the door had brought him all the way over here from his home in San Francisco and led him to do what he had done. He even told them of his meditative comparison between the houses of people that looked so happy and the house of God that looked so unhappy. But while John was relating this modestly, yet with some of the fervor of unction and some comfortable degree of self-forgetfulness, he was interrupted by a sound like a sob, and looking down beyond Elder Burbeck to where Sister Nelson sat, he was surprised to see a handkerchief before her eyes and her shoulders trembling. Over on the other side, too, handkerchiefs were out, so that John suddenly realized that he or somebody had touched something. Who had done it? What had caused it? Once more there came to the young man that eerie consciousness of a power within him not himself, and the feeling frightened him. "That’s all I have to say, brethren," he declared abruptly, his voice growing suddenly hollow. "I am terrified. I want to get away!" Without even the singing of a hymn, John lifted his hand, bowed his head, and murmured something that was to pass for a benediction. *CHAPTER XIX* *HIS NEXT ADVENTURE* Yet once out of the pulpit, John’s sense of terror seemed to leave him. With some of the people coming forward to press his hand and even to wring it; with the Angel of the Chair giving him a wonderful look from her luminous eyes, he began to feel strangely, happily satisfied with himself,—as though adrift upon an unknown sea but without fear and joyously eager for the next adventure. That adventure came when blue-eyed Helen of the Infant Class said pleadingly: "Oh, Brother Hampstead! Will you call on Sister Showalter this afternoon and read a chapter? She is very ill and lonely." "Yes," assented John recklessly. "But explain who it is that’s coming—a book agent—to read to her."