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further thought or investigation of the subjects. Any human interest beyond the acquisition of money and how to please God by doing moral and spiritual works was derogated.

The posters stimulated Irontown to activity. The women came to clean out the village church; the choir began practising assiduously; every young man of the neighbourhood hastened to establish an entente with some girl because to enter religious excitement alone was dull entertainment. Human beings entered Heaven as the animals did the Ark, in pairs. The garage oiled up its automatics. Mr. Biggers, the druggist, who habitually consumed his own morphine, prepared to attempt once more to conquer this vice during the excitement of the protracted meeting; and queer to say, he could dispense with the narcotic as long as the revival lasted.

It would be difficult to put into words what the protracted meeting meant to Mr. Perry Northcutt. He did not drink, smoke, or curse. His wife was fat and obstinate. He compressed his whole emotional outlet into an annual protracted meeting. Mr. Northcutt went about his spiritual preparations for the revival with a concentrated earnestness. He prayed almost incessantly. He fasted two whole days. At the end of the second day, while praying in his home, he felt God stroke his thin hair and say, "My son, your faith shall be rewarded by the greatest revival Irontown has ever known."

He rushed out and told his wife, who received it with a sort of stolid credulity, but the miracle got scattered abroad through the town, and everyone realized that God was going to perform a mighty work in Irontown.

The first services of the revival found all Irontown wending its way to the church. The house itself was a large bare building as uncompromisingly cubical as a box. At one end of the room stood the pulpit, a square wooden pedestal painted white and topped with a large gilt Bible. Behind the pulpit, as a queer relic of vanished archiepiscopal