accounts of what goes on at them."

"Don't go, I beg of you!" urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. "Don't
let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if
there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting.
Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me
to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly
enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge
crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his
soul to any other person all day long."

"I should think the assumption was a safe one," said the priest,
smilingly, "unless," he added on afterthought, "it be by way of a genial
profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my
soul!' when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long
time. I daresay they're all dead."

"I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first," remarked
Theron, musingly. "I date from that experience a whole new life. I have
been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate'
to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over
again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being
frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic about them.
The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over
fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work
conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures
of hell-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything else.
You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you were
there."