The 20th day of last April I was on a protracted debauch; had been for three weeks. My brain was thoroughly stunned with the effects of the liquor I had drunk. I was sitting in a bar-room at seven o'clock in the evening, as far as my memory now serves me, and I appeared to see the face of my wife and child; and then one of my boon companions said, "Join us in a drink." Just then I could no more have taken that drink than I could have transformed myself into an angel of light. At that moment I thought some impending calamity that neither I nor any human power could avert was about to crush me. The next thing that came into my mind was that I must see Mr. Holcombe; and I went out of that saloon into the night, scarcely knowing what I did, feeling that some terrible accident was going to happen; but still this impulse moved me to go to the man I had fought so long and so persistently. I happened to find him before the old Mission, on Jefferson street, near Fifth. He seemed to think that I had now some other object in view than to attack him as formerly, because, the first time in all my career, he was the only man who did reach out his hand and said, "God bless you, my brother." I said: "I want to talk to you; I want you to pray for me." He said, "God bless you, I am the happiest man to meet you that I know of." He asked me to walk down to the Mission. The services were about to commence. I stayed with him that evening. In the morning he made a special prayer for me; and during all my wanderings, I had felt that, perhaps, the prayers of my mother and father would, in the end, reach the throne of grace; and I had never lost my faith in the efficacy of prayer. When he prayed for me, I felt my mother's hand on my head and heard her saying, "God bless and keep my boy." When I left him he said, "Won't you go to your room to-night and pray?" I had no room. He loaned me the money to get a room. I went to the hotel and procured lodging. He said to me, "Say any prayer you think of." The only prayer I could recall was one I had heard in my childhood, "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!" When I made that prayer before the Christian's God, I did it with fear and trembling, for it seemed profanity for a wretch like me, who had defied God's laws, to prostrate himself at His feet and ask the Christian's God to have mercy on him; but I kept up that prayer in my weak, broken way. And to-day, having tried this life one year, you don't know of a man happier than I am. My wife, no longer broken-hearted as in those years of darkness and sorrow, now daily bids me welcome to our happy home. And we recognize together that nothing but this religion of Jesus Christ could have brought this about. I know, from the experiences I have had, that God has forgiven me, the sinner.