Prayer; then he said, "Let us sing," and line after line he gave out the
hymn,

"Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
We wretched sinners lay."

He expounded each stanza, as to the religious sense and the poetic
meaning, before he led the singing. He gave out a passage of Scripture, as
a sort of text, but he did not keep to it; he followed with other
passages, and his discourse was a rehearsal of these rather than a sermon.
His memory in them was unerring; women who knew their Bibles by heart
sighed their satisfaction in his perfectness; they did not care for the
relevance or irrelevance of the passages; all was Scripture, all was the
one inseparable Word of God, dreadful, blissful, divine, promising heaven,
threatening hell. Groans began to go up from the people held in the strong
witchery of the man's voice. They did not know whether he spoke long or
not. Before they knew, he was as if sweeping them to their feet with a
repetition of his opening hymn, and they were singing with him:

"Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
We wretched sinners lay."

It ended, and he gave his wild brutish snort, and then his heart-shaking
cry of "Salvation!"

Some of the chief men remained to speak with him, to contend for him as
their guest; but old David Gillespie did not contend with them. "You can
have him," he said to the miller, Peter Hingston, "if he wants to go with
you." He was almost rude, and his daughter was not opener with the women
who crowded about her trying to make her say something that would feed