the bright vivacity of the summer—­time that used to make him turn hand-springs smote him as a discordant levity.  He was not a hypocrite at all, and he was getting to be alarmed that he was not alarmed at himself.  Every day and night he heard that the spirit of the Lord would probably soon quit striving with him, and leave him out.  The phrase was that he would “grieve away the Holy Spirit.”  John wondered if he was not doing it.  He did everything to put himself in the way of conviction, was constant at the evening meetings, wore a grave face, refrained from play, and tried to feel anxious.  At length he concluded that he must do something.

One night as he walked home from a solemn meeting, at which several of his little playmates had “come forward,” he felt that he could force the crisis.  He was alone on the sandy road; it was an enchanting summer night; the stars danced overhead, and by his side the broad and shallow river ran over its stony bed with a loud but soothing murmur that filled all the air with entreaty.  John did not then know that it sang, “But I go on forever,” yet there was in it for him something of the solemn flow of the eternal world.  When he came in sight of the house, he knelt down in the dust by a pile of rails and prayed.  He prayed that he might feel bad, and be distressed about himself.  As he prayed he heard distinctly, and yet not as a disturbance, the multitudinous croaking of the frogs by the meadow spring.  It was not discordant with his thoughts; it had in it a melancholy pathos, as if it were a kind of call to the unconverted.  What is there in this sound that suggests the tenderness of spring, the despair of a summer night, the desolateness of young love?  Years after it happened to John to be at twilight at a railway station on the edge of the Ravenna marshes.  A little way over the purple plain he saw the darkening towers and heard “the sweet bells of Imola.”  The Holy Pontiff Pius IX. was born at Imola, and passed his boyhood in that serene and moist region.  As the train waited, John heard from miles of marshes round about the evening song of millions of frogs, louder and more melancholy and entreating than the vesper call of the bells.  And instantly his mind went back for the association of sound is as subtle as that of odor—­to the prayer, years ago, by the roadside and the plaintive appeal of the unheeded frogs, and he wondered if the little Pope had not heard the like importunity, and perhaps, when he thought of himself as a little Pope, associated his conversion with this plaintive sound.

John prayed, but without feeling any worse, and then went desperately into the house, and told the family that he was in an anxious state of mind.  This was joyful news to the sweet and pious household, and the little boy was urged to feel that he was a sinner, to repent, and to become that night a Christian; he was prayed over, and told to read the Bible, and put to bed with the injunction to repeat all the texts