Close to the small platform was a circle of street Arabs, awed into silence and respect by the charm of this remarkable personality. Next to them came a ring of women—some of them old and gray, with haggard and wrinkled countenances upon which Time, with his antique pen, had traced many illegible hieroglyphs; some of them young and bedizened with tinsel jewelry and flashy clothing; not a few of them middle-aged, wan, dispirited and bearing upon their hips bundles wrapped in faded shawls, from which came occasionally that most distressing of sounds, the wail of an ill-fed and unloved infant, crying in the night.
Outside of this zone of female misery and degradation, there was a belt of masculine stupidity and crime; men with corpulent bodies, bull necks, double chins, pile-driving heads; men of shrunken frames, cadaverous cheeks, deep-set and beady eyes—vermin-covered, disease-devoured, hope-deserted. They clung around him, these concentric circles of humanity, like rings around a luminous planet, held by they knew not what resistless attraction.
The simple melody, borne upon the pinions of that resonant and cello-like voice, attained an almost supernatural influence over their perverted natures. When it ceased, an audible sigh arose, an involuntary tribute of adoration and of awe.
As soon as he had finished his hymn, this consecrated apostle to the lost sheep of the great city opened a well-worn volume.
The passage which he read, or rather chanted, was the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the awe-inspiring sentences sending through the circles of humanity which were tightening about him visible vibrations.
When he finished his reading, he began an address full of homely wit and pathos, in which, with all the rich and striking imagery culled from a varied life in the wildernesses of the great forests and the great cities of our continent, he appealed to that consciousness of "the true, the beautiful and the good" which he believed to lie dormant, but capable of resurrection, in the soul of every man.
A few of his auditors were too far gone with fatigue or intoxication to follow him, and elbowing their way through the crowd shot off into the night upon their various tangents of stupidity or crime; but most of the spectators listened with a sort of rapt and involuntary attention.
The influence which he exerted over the mind of the young man whom he had unconsciously saved from suicide was as irresistible as it was inscrutable. His language had the charm of perfect familiarity. Every word and phrase had fallen from his own lips a hundred times in similar exhortations. In fact, they seemed to him strangely like the echo of his own voice coming back upon him from the dim and half-forgotten past.
His interest and excitement culminated in an incident for which the listener was totally unprepared. The speaker who had been exhorting his audience upon the testimony of prophet and apostle now appealed to his own personal experience.
"Look at me!" he said, laying his great hand on his broad chest. "I was once as hardened and desperate a man as any of you; but God saved me! See this book!" he added, holding up the old volume. "I will tell you a story about it. I found it in a log cabin away out in the frontier state of Ohio. Listen, and I will tell you how. I had left a lumber camp with a company of frontiersmen one Sunday morning, to go to a new clearing which 'we were making in the wilderness, when I suddenly discovered that I had forgotten my axe. Swearing at my misfortune, I returned to get it. As I approached the cabin which I had left a few minutes before, I heard a human voice. I paused in surprise, crept quietly to the door and listened. Some one was talking in almost the very language in which I have spoken to you. I was frightened and fled! Escaping into the depths of the forest, I lay down at the root of a great tree, and for the first time in my life I made a silence in my soul and listened to the voice of God. I know not how long I lay there; but at last when I recovered my consciousness I returned to the cabin. It was silent and empty; but on the floor I found this book."