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ject of prayer at the daily chapel exercise and the weekly prayer meeting, attendance upon which was obligatory.

I was singularly unresponsive to all these forms of emotional appeal,

although I became unspeakably embarrassed when they were presented

to me at close range by a teacher during the "silent hour," which we

were all required to observe every evening and which was never broken into, even by a member of the faculty, unless the errand was one of

grave import. I found these occasional interviews on the part of one of

the more serious young teachers, of whom I was extremely fond, hard

to endure, as was a long series of conversations in my senior year conducted by one of the most enthusiastic members of the faculty, in

which the desirability of Turkey as a field for missionary labor was

enticingly put before me. I suppose I held myself aloof from all these

influences, partly owing to the fact that my father was not a

communicant of any church, and I tremendously admired his scrupulous morality and sense of honor in all matters of personal and public

conduct, and also because the little group to which I have referred was

much given to a sort of rationalism, doubtless founded upon an early

reading of Emerson. In this connection, when Bronson Alcott came to

lecture at the school, we all vied with each other for a chance to do

him a personal service because he had been a friend of Emerson, and

we were inexpressibly scornful of our younger fellow-students who

cared for him merely on the basis of his grandfatherly relation to

"Little Women." I recall cleaning the clay of the unpaved streets off

his heavy cloth overshoes in a state of ecstatic energy.

But I think in my case there were other factors as well that contributed to my unresponsiveness to the evangelical appeal. A curious

course of reading I had marked out for myself in medieval history,

seems to have left me fascinated by an ideal of mingled learning, piety,

and physical labor, more nearly exemplified by the Port Royalists than

by any others.

The only moments in which I seem to have approximated in my

own experience to a faint realization of the "beauty of holiness," as I conceived it, was each Sunday morning between the hours of nine and

ten, when I went into the exquisitely neat room of the teacher of

Greek and read with her from a Greek testament. We did this every

Sunday morning for two years. It was not exactly a lesson, for I never

prepared for it, and while I was held within reasonable bounds of syn