Ah, listen indeed!  For a stranger, wilder chant than this which now went swelling up from that frenzied, swaying mass of humanity surely never stirred all that is most mystical in the soul of man!  Pealing grandly, awfully upward through the star-lit spaces of a grander temple than ever was reared by human hands, it rolled heavenward, on and on, and higher and higher, to the very dome of the firmament.

With the wild chanting, the madness of the multitude increased.  Many men and women—­ay, and little children, too—­all dropped to their knees, heedless of being trodden underfoot by the unfallen frenzied, and thus crept the length of the earthen floor to the foot of the rude altar.  Here, before the pulpit of rough-hewn logs, great heaps of straw were strewn thick and broadcast.  On these straw heaps men and women fell prostrate side by side, and lay as if they were dead.  Others, both men and women, were suddenly seized with the unnatural, convulsive jerking which gave this mysterious visitation its best-known name.  Under this dreadful tremor the long hair of delicate ladies poured unnoticed over the most modest shoulders and flew back and forth with the sound of a whip; for those so wildly wrought upon were not solely of the humble and the ignorant.  The highest and the most refined of the whole country were there.  The earth was strewn with costly raiment.  Gentlemen rent the fine ruffles from their wrists and their bosoms; gentlewomen cast their richest ornaments to the winds.  And all the while that this awful, majestic, soul-stirring chant was thus mounting higher and growing wilder, many were whirling and dancing.

David shrunk back, and the doctor drew him closer to his side, as a man suddenly burst out of the swirling mass of maddened humanity, and dashed past them into the forest.  There, still within the wide circle of flaring, smoking, torchlight, the poor creature threw his arms around a tree, and uttering strange, savage cries like the barking of a dog, he dashed his head against the tree-trunk till the blood gushed out and poured down his ghastly face.  David clung closer to the doctor’s arm and turned his eyes away, feeling sick and faint with horror.

“Don’t look at him.  Turn your head.  I must go to him and help him if I can,” the doctor said, gently loosing the boy’s grasp.  “I shouldn’t have brought you here.  But—­Good God!  Who is that?” he cried sharply.  “Look!  Quick!  Do you know that girl?  Over there by the last pillar—­yonder, yonder, with her face turned this way!”

In his eagerness he seized the boy, fairly lifting him from the ground, and held him up so that he could see over all the heads of the surging, swirling crowd.  The girl was still there, and David recognized Ruth.  She was standing not far off and near the edge of the shed.  Close behind her the torches threw out gloomy banners of smoke and vivid streamers of flame, and against them she appeared a quiet, white