which produce complacency. It stages only a few opportunities of telling
"Why I like this Institute."

So, at the camp fires a man talked to the boys and a woman to the girls,
not about the Institute, but about life. These speakers knew the strange
effect an Institute week has on impressionable and romantic youth; they
knew that by this time scores of the students were either saying to
themselves, "I've got to do something big before this thing's over," or
were vainly trying to put the conviction away.

The woman who talked to the girls happened to be a preacher's wife.
This gave her a certain advantage when she told the listening girls that
the greatest of all occupations for them was not some special vocation,
but what Ida Tarbell has called "the business of being a woman." It was
good preparation for the next day's program, with its specific and
glamorous appeal, for it put first the great claim, so that special
vocations could be seen in clear air and could be fairly measured.

Pastor Drury, who talked to the boys, was talking to them all, as J.W.
very well knew, but every word seemed for him; as, indeed, it was, in a
sense that he did not suspect. He was not surprised that his pastor
should present the Christian life as effectively livable by bricklayers
and business men as surely as by missionaries. He had heard that before.
But to J.W. the old message had a new setting, a new force. And never
before had he been so ready to receive it.

The songs had sung themselves out, as the fire changed from roaring
flame and flying sparks to a great bed of living coals. From the world's
beginning a glowing hearth has been perfect focus for straight thought
and plain speech. The boys found it so this night.