“Is it possible?  How did you find this out?”

“Mrs. Heale had been in, listening to their howling, just before she was taken.  Heale went in when I turned him out of doors; came home raving mad, and is all but blue now.  Three cases of women have I had this morning, all frightened into cholera, by their own confession, by last night’s tomfoolery.—­Came home howling, fainted, and were taken before morning.  One is dead, the other two will die.  You must stop it, or I shall have half-a-dozen more to-night.  Go into the meeting, and curse the cur to his face!”

“I cannot,” cried Frank, with a gesture of despair, “I cannot!”

“Ah, your cloth forbids you, I suppose, to enter the non-conformist opposition shop.”

“You are unjust, Thurnall!  What are such rules at a moment like this?  I’d break them, and the bishop would hold me guiltless.  But I cannot speak to these people.  I have no eloquence—­no readiness—­they do not trust me—­would not believe me—­God help me!” and Frank covered his face with his hands, and burst into tears.

“Not that, for Heaven’s sake!” said Tom, “or we shall have you blue next, my good fellow.  I’d go myself, but they’d not hear me, for certain; I am no Christian, I suppose:  at least, I can’t talk their slang:—­but I know who can!  We’ll send Campbell!”

Frank hailed the suggestion with rapture, and away they went:  but they had an hour’s good search from sufferer to sufferer before they found the Major.

He heard them quietly.  A severe gloom settled over his face.  “I will go,” said he.

At six o’clock that evening, the meeting-house was filling with terrified women, and half-curious, half-sneering, men; and among them the tall figure of Major Campbell, in his undress uniform (which he had put on, wisely, to give a certain dignity to his mission), stalked in, and took his seat in the back benches.

The sermon was what he expected.  There is no need to transcribe it.  Such discourses may be heard often enough in churches as well as chapels.  The preacher’s object seemed to be—­for some purpose or other which we have no right to judge—­to excite in his hearers the utmost intensity of selfish fear, by language which certainly, as Tom had said, came under the law against profane cursing and swearing.  He described the next world in language which seemed a strange jumble of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Koran, the dreams of those rabbis who crucified our Lord, and of those mediaeval inquisitors who tried to convert sinners (and on their own ground, neither illogically nor over-harshly) by making this world for a few hours as like as possible to what, so they held, God was going to make the world to come for ever.

At last he stopped suddenly, when he saw that the animal excitement was at the very highest; and called on all who felt “convinced” to come forward and confess their sins.