'Dear friends, such are some of your answers to my question. Can I find, do you think, one answer, one description, which will suit you all—fishermen, mothers, boys and girls, artists, merchants, gentlemen, the old man and the little child? Yes, I can. If I could hand you each a piece of paper and a pencil this day, there is one description of yourself which each of you might write, one occupation which would include you all, the old, the young, the rich and the poor. Each of you, without exception, might write this—I am a servant.
'I, the speaker, am a servant; you who listen, all of you, are servants.'
'Well, I don't know how he is going to make that out,' I said to myself. 'I thought he was going to say we were all sinners, and that, I suppose, we are, but servants! I do not believe I am anybody's servant.'
'All servants,' he went on, 'but not all in the same service. As God and the angels look down upon this green to-day they see gathering together a great company of servants, but they also see that we are not all servants of the same master. They see what we do not see, a dividing line between us. On one side of the line God sees, and the angels see, one company of servants—and in God's book He gives us the name of their master—Servants of sin.
'On the other side of the line, God sees, and the angels see, another company of servants—Servants of Christ.
'Which company do you belong to, dear friend? You fishermen on the bank there, what are you? Little child, what are you?—a servant of sin, or a servant of Jesus Christ?
So I tried to turn it off from myself, and to forget the words which had been spoken. And whenever the question came back to me, the question which the speaker had repeated so often, 'What are you?' I answered it by saying to myself, 'I am a poor artist, having a holiday in Runswick Bay, and I am not going to trouble my head with gloomy thoughts.'
Polly had prepared an excellent dinner in honour of the day, and I did full justice to it. Then I determined to walk to Staithes, and to spend the rest of the day in seeing the country. I had always been accustomed, to paint on Sunday, but only one of the artists seemed to be at work, and Duncan and Polly had been so much shocked by seeing him, that I did not venture to do the same. I enjoyed the walk along the cliffs, and came back in good spirits, having completely shaken off, as I imagined, the remembrance of the speaker's words.