The influence which he exerted over the mind of the young man whom he had unconsciously saved from suicide was as irresistible as it was inscrutable.  His language had the charm of perfect familiarity.  Every word and phrase had fallen from his own lips a hundred times in similar exhortations.  In fact, they seemed to him strangely like the echo of his own voice coming back upon him from the dim and half-forgotten past.

His interest and excitement culminated in an incident for which the listener was totally unprepared.  The speaker who had been exhorting his audience upon the testimony of prophet and apostle now appealed to his own personal experience.

“Look at me!” he said, laying his great hand on his broad chest.  “I was once as hardened and desperate a man as any of you; but God saved me!  See this book!” he added, holding up the old volume.  “I will tell you a story about it.  I found it in a log cabin away out in the frontier state of Ohio.  Listen, and I will tell you how.  I had left a lumber camp with a company of frontiersmen one Sunday morning, to go to a new clearing which ’we were making in the wilderness, when I suddenly discovered that I had forgotten my axe.  Swearing at my misfortune, I returned to get it.  As I approached the cabin which I had left a few minutes before, I heard a human voice.  I paused in surprise, crept quietly to the door and listened.  Some one was talking in almost the very language in which I have spoken to you.  I was frightened and fled!  Escaping into the depths of the forest, I lay down at the root of a great tree, and for the first time in my life I made a silence in my soul and listened to the voice of God.  I know not how long I lay there; but at last when I recovered my consciousness I returned to the cabin.  It was silent and empty; but on the floor I found this book.”

“Good God!” exclaimed a voice.

So rapt had been the attention of the hearers that at this unexpected interruption the women screamed and the men made a wide path for the figure that burst through them and rushed toward the platform.

The speaker paused and fixed his eye upon the man who pressed eagerly toward him.

“Tell me whether a red line is drawn down the edge of that chapter, and a hand is pointing toward the fifth and sixth verses!” he cried.

“It is,” replied the lumberman.

“Then let me take it!” exclaimed David, reaching out his trembling hands.

“What for?”

“Because it is mine!  I am the man who proclaimed the holy faith, and, God forgive me, abandoned it even as you received it!”

The astonished lumberman handed him the Bible, and he covered it with kisses and tears.  In the meantime, the crowd, excited by the spectacular elements of the drama, surged round the actors, and the preacher, reaching down, took David by the arm and raised him to the platform.

“Be quiet, my friends,” he said with a gesture of command, “and when this prodigal has regained his composure we will ask him to tell us his story.”