Carlsen had evidently forgotten all about the three-minutes rule and was launching himself into a regular oration that meant, in his usual surroundings before his usual audience, an hour at least, when the man just behind him pulled him down unceremoniously and arose.  Carlsen was angry at first and threatened a little disturbance, but the Bishop reminded him of the rule, and he subsided with several mutterings in his beard, while the next speaker began with a very strong eulogy on the value of the single tax as a genuine remedy for all the social ills.  He was followed by a man who made a bitter attack on the churches and ministers, and declared that the two great obstacles in the way of all true reform were the courts and the ecclesiastical machines.

When he sat down a man who bore every mark of being a street laborer sprang to his feet and poured a perfect torrent of abuse against the corporations, especially the railroads.  The minute his time was up a big, brawny fellow, who said he was a metal worker by trade, claimed the floor and declared that the remedy for the social wrongs was Trades Unionism.  This, he said, would bring on the millennium for labor more surely than anything else.  The next man endeavored to give some reasons why so many persons were out of employment, and condemned inventions as works of the devil.  He was loudly applauded by the rest.

Finally the Bishop called time on the “free for all,” and asked Rachel to sing.

Rachel Winslow had grown into a very strong, healthful, humble Christian during that wonderful year in Raymond dating from the Sunday when she first took the pledge to do as Jesus would do, and her great talent for song had been fully consecrated to the service of the Master.  When she began to sing tonight at this Settlement meeting, she had never prayed more deeply for results to come from her voice, the voice which she now regarded as the Master’s, to be used for Him.

Certainly her prayer was being answered as she sang.  She had chosen the words,

“Hark!  The voice of Jesus calling, Follow me, follow me!”

Again Henry Maxwell, sitting there, was reminded of his first night at the Rectangle in the tent when Rachel sang the people into quiet.  The effect was the same here.  What wonderful power a good voice consecrated to the Master’s service always is!  Rachel’s great natural ability would have made her one of the foremost opera singers of the age.  Surely this audience had never heard such a melody.  How could it?  The men who had drifted in from the street sat entranced by a voice which “back in the world,” as the Bishop said, never could be heard by the common people because the owner of it would charge two or three dollars for the privilege.  The song poured out through the hall as free and glad as if it were a foretaste of salvation itself.  Carlsen, with his great, black-bearded face uplifted, absorbed the music with the deep love of it peculiar to his nationality, and