“Now there’s lots of things I could say to you this evening; but the only one I want to jam right home is this: You and us look at this thing from different points of view. You come here hoping that we’re going to help you to keep straight. That’s all right. So we are; and we’ll all be on the job from this night forward. You won’t find us taking no vacation, and your next friends here’ll worry you like your own consciences. They’ll never leave you alone the minute you ain’t safe. You’ll hear ’em promise to hunt for you if you go astray, and go down into the ditch with you and pull you out. There’ll be no dive so deep that they won’t go after you, and no kicks and curses that you can give ’em that they won’t stand in order to haul you back. That’s all gospel true, as you’re going to find out if you go back on your promises. But that ain’t the way the rest of us—the hundred and fifty of us that you see here to-night—looks at it at all. What we see ain’t two men we’re tumbling over each other to help; we see two men that’s coming to help us. And, oh, men, you’d better believe that we need your help! You look round and you see this elegant house—and the beds—and the grub—and everything decent and reg’lar—and you think how swell we’ve got ourselves fixed. But I tell you, men, we’re fighting for our life—the whole hundred and fifty of us! And another hundred and fifty that ain’t here! And another hundred and fifty that’s scattered to the four winds of the earth; we’re fighting for our life; we’re fighting with our back against the wall. We ain’t out of danger because we’ve been a year or two years or five years in the club. We’re never out of danger. We need every ounce of support that any one can bring to us; and here you fellows come bringing it! You’re bringing it, Colin MacPherson, and you’re bringing it, Tapley Toms; and there ain’t a guy among us that isn’t glad and grateful. If you go back on your own better selves you go back on us first of all; and if either of you falls, you leave each one of us so much the weaker.” That, with a funny story or two, was the gist of it; but delivered in a low, richly vibrating voice, audible in every corner of the room and addressed directly and earnestly to the two candidates, its effect was not unlike that of Whitfield’s dying man preaching to dying men. All the scarred, haunted faces, behind each of which there lurked memories blacker than those of the madhouse, were turned toward the speaker raptly. Knowledge of their own hearts and knowledge of his gave the words a power and a value beyond anything they carried on the surface. The red-hot experience of a hundred and fifty men was poured molten into the minute, to give to the promises the two postulants were presently called on to make a kind of iron vigor.