At one place where I went to hold meetings it was advertised in the papers that I was going to stay thirty days. Now, there was a lady who was a member of one of the churches, and she said:
“I don’t want to have my boy brought under the influence of those meetings. I’m afraid he’ll be brought into the Young Men’s Christian Association, and they’ll have him out on the streets with tracts, and it would be very embarrassing to me to have my son doing such a thing as that.”
She was ambitious for her boy, and wanted to get him into the bon-ton society, as they call it. So she planned to take her son out of the city and to be gone for those thirty days. She told her a Christian man why she had taken him, but I knew nothing about it.
The meetings went on, and just at my right hand sat that Christian man, from the beginning till the end, until the last meeting, when he was absent. Just as the benediction was pronounced, and the people were about to leave, he came rushing in, and said he was so sorry he had not been there.
“I have just been called on one of the saddest errands of my life,” he said, and went on to tell me that that mother who had taken her son away from the influence of those meetings had brought him back that day in his coffin, and he had just come from the funeral.