had been painted, but he felt still more the spell of the young man's ardent enthusiasm.
"You must have thought that out very carefully, John," he said.
"Brother Campbell!" answered John fervently, "I have done more than think it out. I have felt it out. I propose to live it out!"
But Doctor Campbell had kept his head amid this swirl of words, and his return was quietly forceful.
"The stage of to-day," he began, "as I know it from the newspapers and the billboards, never seemed so vulgar and damnable as it does now after your glorious idealization of it. I, as a preacher of righteousness, must judge of such an institution externally, by its effects. I have weighed the stage in the balance, John, and I have found it wanting."
This time there was something in the minister's calm tone, in the cool detachment of his point of view, that held John silent.
"Isn't it possible," the minister continued, in a kind of sweet reasonableness, "that there is something insidiously demoralizing or infectious about it? Take your own experience, John. You are a Christian man. You have been soaking yourself in the atmosphere of the stage for a couple of weeks. Examine your soul now, and answer me if you are as fine, as pure a man as you were before you went there. Are you?"
"Why, of course I am," ejaculated Hampstead impulsively.
"Think," commanded the minister, in low, compelling tones; for having controlled his emotions the better, he was just now the stronger of the two. "Are you—John?"
Hampstead opened his mouth eagerly, but the minister's repressing gesture would not let him speak. The young
