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Redeemer, Amen." ["Amen! God grant it; Blessed Master!"]

Came a sliding noise as the congregation got to their seats again. Mr. Northcutt had tears in his eyes and he wiped them without any concealment. The minister said, "Number fifty-four," and nodded at the choir leader. The pale girl at the organ flushed slightly, then began swaying back and forth pedalling, and the next moment the little reed organ broke into a harsh unmusical prelude which somewhat resembled a gigantic snoring. As the prelude ended, came a pause; the choir leader began beating time, and the choir of untrained voices, never quite together, several a little off pitch, arose in chorus. Certain nasal voices gave the whole volume of sound the effect of having sharp edges, but the effective feature of the hymn was the exaggerated beat of its time. Mrs. Roxie Biggers, who sat in the seat nearest the organ, marked this tempo with a sharp bobbing of her gray head. The bass voices accented it with a monotonous tum-tum-tum. Every long vowel was stretched out into a pounding polysyllable. The song ran:

The effect was a hammering on the tympanum which later in the meeting would produce clear-cut hypnotic effects.

The audience heard this first drumming with a foretaste of the fuller frenzy to come. The banker's eyes brightened as he was about to plunge into his annual orgy. Others dreaded it. Still others looked forward to it with a sense of high entertainment. Yet everyone in the village, except Belshue, sincerely believed that what would follow would be a miraculous manifestation of God's power. They prayed earnestly for this thing to happen.

When the singing was over the Reverend Blackman came