“At the second meeting, there were some still higher, purer souls, and more eloquent and commanding tongues; lips touched with fire, whose words were flame consuming the wrong principle, that shrivelled up before it. But I do not mean to become eloquent myself. This is not the time or place, nor are you the audience. It is enough to say that the speakers in that meeting gave me the heartache and the headache, and I wished in my soul I had never entered their hall. Yet nevertheless a fascination drew me there the third evening. And then, whether ‘the master minds’ of the cause had said all they had to say for the time, or whether they had not yet arrived upon the scene of action, I really cannot say—(for the room was crowded, and not by friends of the cause, as you will hear, but by conspirators, who had come there to break the meeting up)—but certainly, after one short address of thrilling eloquence and power—during the progress of which I felt myself to be a participant in an injustice, and at the close of which I was ready to make an irrevocable oath to clear my life from the sin—up jumps a fellow, with more zeal than knowledge, and more deviltry, I perfectly believe, than either, and so defames me and my fellow-citizens of the South, and so caricatures us as monsters of atrocity, and so whirrs and rattles whips and chains and gyves about my ears and eyes, that it was the cast of a die whether I should laugh or swear. But before it was decided, a resolution was put and an amendment offered, and two or three people rose, and half a dozen began to speak, and everybody wanted to talk, and nobody—but me—wanted to hear, and there was a confusion inside and a gathering mob outside, and in an incredibly short time there was a hailstorm of stones, and battered walls, and smashed windows, and the meeting was broken up in a row; and my Celtic blood boiled up and boiled over; and while laying about me valiantly in defence of freedom of speech, _I lost myself_. And when I found myself, I was lying with a broken arm and broken head in the watchhouse!” “Good gracious, Mark! what a dishonour! What would my sister, what would my niece, say to that?” “They do not know it, and they need not.” “Well, really, one would have thought that would have cured you!” “My good uncle, it did—of _indecision_. One is very apt to be confirmed to a cause in which they have suffered somewhat. I lay very ill for two weeks. During that time I was ministered to by some excellent men, and _women_ also—persons whose disinterestedness, benevolence, gentleness, and perfect sincerity, gave me such a deep and beautiful impression of the Christian character as I had never received from book or pulpit—persons who had sacrificed fortune, position, friendships—_all_, to a pure but despised cause. It was the silent influence, even more than the spoken words of these, which fixed me forever in my good purpose.”