The young man replied with much agitation: "O Hill, you may obtain religion, but I never can! I came here a professor of religion; but through fear I dissembled it, and have been carried along with the wicked, until I fear there is no hope for me."
He told me that there were two others who he believed were somewhat serious. We agreed to take up the subject of religion in earnest, and seek it together. We invited the other two, and held a prayer-meeting in my room on the next Saturday afternoon. And, O, what a prayer-meeting! We knew not how to pray, but tried to do it. We sang in a suppressed manner, for we feared the other students. But they found us out, and gathered round the door, and made such a noise that the officers had to disperse them.
So serious was the disturbance that the president, the late excellent Rev. Dr. John B. Smith, investigated the matter at prayers that evening in the chapel hall. When he demanded the reason of the riot, a ringleader in wickedness rose up and stated that it was occasioned by three or four of the boys holding prayer-meetings, and they were determined to have no such doings there. The good president heard the statement with deep emotion, and, looking at the youths charged with the sin of praying, said, with tears in his eyes, "O, is there such a state of things in this college? Then God has come near to us. My dear young friends, you shall hold your next meeting in my parlor." We did hold our next meeting in his parlor, and half the college was there. And there began a glorious revival of religion, which pervaded the college, and spread into the country around.
Many of those students became ministers of the gospel. The youth who brought me "Alleine's Alarm" from his mother was my friend, the Rev. C. Stitt, who is preaching in Virginia. And he who interrupted me in reading the work, my venerable and worthy friend, the Rev. Dr. H., is now president of a college in the West.—Selected.
"STRAIGHTENING OUT THE FURROWS"
"Boys," he said, "I have been trying every day of my life for the last two years to straighten out furrows, and I cannot do it."
One boy turned his head in surprise toward the captain's neatly kept place.
"O, I do not mean that kind, lad! I do not mean land furrows," continued the captain, so soberly that the attention of the boys became breathless as he went on: "When I was a lad about the age of you boys, I was what they call a 'hard case,' not exactly bad or vicious, but wayward and wild. Well, my dear old mother used to coax, pray, and punish. My father was dead, making it all the harder for her, but she never got impatient. How in the world she bore all my stubborn, vexing ways so patiently will always be to me one of the mysteries of life. I knew it was troubling her, knew it was changing her pretty face, making it look anxious and old. After a while, tired of all restraint, I ran away, went off to sea; and a rough time I had of it at first. Still I liked the water, and I liked journeying around from place to place.
"Then I settled down to business in a foreign land, and soon became prosperous. Now I began sending her something besides empty letters. And such beautiful letters as she always wrote me during those years of absence. At length I noticed how long they grew, longing for the son who used to try her so, and it awoke a corresponding longing in my heart to go back to the clear waiting soul. So when I could stand it no longer, I came back, and such a welcome, and such a surprise!
"My mother is not a very old lady, boys, but the first thing I noticed was the whiteness of her hair and the deep furrows on her brow; and I knew I had helped to blanch that hair to its snowy whiteness and had drawn those lines in that smooth forehead. And those are the furrows I have been trying to straighten out.