praying for them. The evening passed. The next day my grandparents heard
sobbing and crying in the daughter's room, and they went in and found
her praying for the salvation of God, and her daughter Phoebe said, "I
wish you would go to the barn and to the waggon-house for Jehiel and
David (the brothers) are under powerful conviction of sin." My
grandparent went to the barn, and Jehiel, who afterward became a useful
minister of the Gospel, was imploring the mercy of Christ; and then,
having first knelt with him and commended his soul to Christ, they went
to the waggon-house, and there was David crying for the salvation of his
soul--David, who afterward became my father. David could not keep the
story to himself, and he crossed the fields to a farmhouse and told one
to whom he had been affianced the story of his own salvation, and she
yielded her heart to God. The story of the converted household went all
through the neighbourhood. In a few weeks two hundred souls stood up in
the plain meeting house at Somerville to profess faith in Christ, among
them David and Catherine, afterward my parents.

[Illustration: DAVID TALMAGE. CATHERINE TALMAGE. (_The Parents of Dr. T.
DeWitt Talmage_)]

My mother, impressed with that, in after life, when she had a large
family of children gathered around her, made a covenant with three
neighbours, three mothers. They would meet once a week to pray for the
salvation of their children until all their children were
converted--this incident was not known until after my mother's death,
the covenant then being revealed by one of the survivors. We used to
say: "Mother, where are you going?" and she would say, "I am just going
out a little while; going over to the neighbours." They kept on in that
covenant until all their families were brought into the kingdom of God,
myself the last, and I trace that line of results back to that evening