Now, let me see, this is just about the beginning of the real story, and I am so anxious to tell it all, though I really feel a hesitancy. However, when I am through with the letter, I can leave out any part of it that doesn’t sound seemly for me to tell about him--and me, can’t I? To begin with, I hardly know how to make you understand about that baby’s stomach, and how near a tragedy it was. Don’t laugh! I tremble when I think about it, and I don’t ever believe I’ll learn to do it to them. I hope I won’t have to practise on one of my own first; but, then, it would be awful to kill another woman’s baby experimenting on it, wouldn’t it? I’d better not think about that now, or I can’t tell the rest of the story. Well, after the doxology had been sung by the strange Gabriel in the next room, accompanied by some really lovely rough men’s voices, and he had sent them away so he could see to the sick baby in the other room, I lay still and had a racking, glorious experience. For the first time in my life I really prayed to Something that answered in the dark. I didn’t have much to say for myself, but a great Gentleness reached down and laid hold of me for always, and I can never be lost from Him any more, and I knew it. _Now_, I have been taught that it is called the witness of the spirit, and it’s what Grandmother Wickliffe had. But I didn’t inherit it; I had to find it myself, and I got it through tribulation, by the way of Gabriel’s song in the terror of the night, followed by the sermon to Bill. And while I was lying there under the quilt, just shouting in my soul with ancestral ardor, I was called to come forth and attest my new convictions. And I did. If I hadn’t got that faith in God just a few minutes before on the wings of a great emotion, I never could have steeled myself to taking that awful purple, twitching baby and helping Gabriel do the dreadful things to it he did. I would have taken to the woods at the first look at it. But I know now that I had got the real religion that darts right through the emotions, and prods you up to do things. And I did them. “It’ll die, and I can’t hold it,” whimpered the poor exhausted mother when Gabriel told her to hold the baby’s mouth open while he poured in the hot water. At that time I was still safe and rejoicing over myself under the quilt. “You must hold him while I wash him out, or he _will_ die. Come, brace up and help me!” I heard Gabriel plead to the poor creature, with positive agony in his voice, while the baby moaned. “No use, Leader; I’ve done give’ up,” and I heard her fling herself on the floor and begin to moan in chorus with the baby. It took me just half a minute to get to my feet, into that other room, and that baby in my arms, as awful to look at as it was. Of course it seemed as if God was honoring me by crowding works on my new faith pretty closely, and how I got through with such credit I don’t see; but I did.