I looked around for my cousins.
There was Dempster, with the eyes fairly dancing in his head, clapping his hands like an overgrown boy, though he did drop them when he met my look, and turned his head away, half ashamed of his own feelings.
I looked around for E. E., who sat with her mouth half open, while sobs came through her trembling lips.
"Oh, cousin, cousin, what shall I do? Have I really been regenerated, or has the Lord sent me here this day to be made a new creature?"
I did not answer her; there was no chance for free thought or cool reason in a crowd like that. In fact, I began to feel like a vile sinner, myself, and as if being unregenerated was the duty of every female woman every time a camp-meeting offered a good opportunity. Seeing E. E. crying there as if her heart were breaking up, and both men and women wild with joy or grief all around me, I just caved in, pulled out my handkerchief, and sobbed with them, though what on earth we were all crying about I couldn't have told to save my life.
The truth was, the more some women cried the more others shouted; and when the meeting was over, everybody told everybody else what a refreshing time they had experienced under Brother Inskip's preaching, which was true as the Gospel, if tears refresh the soul as rain does the earth.
LXXXIV.
EXPERIENCES.
AFTER the preaching was done, the crowd broke up into sections and had a half-dozen prayer-meetings and spontaneous love-feasts, where men and women, and sometimes little children, got up and told all the strangers within hearing how wicked they had been—with tears, and sobs, and groans, that made one's heart ache. Still one and all of them seemed to enjoy their own depravity and put themselves down as such horrible sinners, that any amount of praying could not have dug them out of the degradation into which they dived headforemost and seemed to revel in, for a thousand years at least.