I held their attention that night for four hours while I told the story of Jean Valjean. Next day we were all photographed together on a pile of stones near the "hole."
After that these fellows protected the chapel and made themselves useful in their way. In less than a year afterward half of them had gone to honest work; the rest went the way of the transgressor, to the penetentiary and the reform school.
This period was one of total rejection by any means—powerful influences were at work to render my labour void—but they were offset for a time by the finer influences of life. I gave a series of addresses in Tabor College, Iowa, and they were the beginning of an awakening among the students. After the last word of the last address the student about whom the president and faculty were most concerned walked up the aisle and expressed a desire to lead a new life.
"Do it now," I suggested.
"Right here?"
"Yes, right where you stand."
The president and faculty gathered around him, making a circle; he stood in the midst, alone, and in that way with prayer and dedication from the lips of the young man and his friends began one of the most useful lives in the American ministry. This young man became an ascetic. I gave him to read the life of Francis of Assisi, and he went to the extreme in emulation. He divested himself of collars and ties and on graduating read his thesis for his Bachelor's degree collarless and tieless.
I was in New Haven when he came there to take his Divinity degree in Yale. He came without either collar or tie, but after days of prayer and fasting he was "led" to enter the University as others entered it. He is now pastor of the First Congregational Church in Rockford, Illinois; his name is Frank M. Sheldon. Nine men have gone by a similar route into the ministry, but Mr. Sheldon is the only one of them who has kept touch with the modern demands on religious leadership.
Birthdays have meant nothing whatever to me, but I made my thirty-second an occasion for a party on "the bottoms."
I could only accommodate seven guests. Two were favourite boys and the others were selected because of their great need. The hut was the centre of a mud puddle that January morning. I got a long plank and laid it from my doorstep to the edge of the clay bank. I took precaution not to announce the affair, even to the guests, but a grocer's boy who had been sent by a friend with some oranges lost his way and his inquiry after me created such a sensation that when he found me he was accompanied by about fifty children.