DEAR SISTERS:—I have been two days at this camp-meeting, fasting, because I have given up the fight about something to eat, and awake all night because the hot weather almost drove me into the anxious seat, from dread of a hotter place.

I hope you are satisfied with the way I have been walking this straight and narrow path of missionary duty. I wish I could say quiet path, but, being of an honest turn of mind, I must say it is both steep and noisy. Just at this minute a prayer-meeting and revival is going on in the next tent to ours and the groaning and shouting is enough to drive one crazy. The tent is crowded full of women and children, and I don't know which jump the highest or make the most noise.

Well, I am not a wife—which you know is not my fault; neither am I a mother, which, under the circumstances, I am grateful for; but why little boys and girls should be brought here, and put in the way of a second birth, puzzles me. One event of that kind ought to be enough for any family of moderate ambition. In fact, I know of people who would do without any, with Christian fortitude. But here we are—men, women, and children—trying to save each other with all our might, and doing it in a way that brings strangers together with a jerk sometimes.

Just as we were coming into the camping-ground this morning, where the whole road was beginning to swarm again, a nice old lady, in a gray dress, and with a little, white muslin shawl pinned over her bosom, came up to me, and, lifting her meek eyes from under her sugar-scoop bonnet, informed me that the Spirit was upon her. She was exercised with a sense of duty regarding my sinful condition, which was miserably apparent in the white feather that curlecued itself around my hat, and the cut of my gaiter boots that had heels enough to send a dozen souls to everlasting ruin.

I looked down at my boot, which is a scrumptious one, and said, with thankfulness, that I couldn't see anything in them that should carry the souls off; besides, they could be heeled again.

The woman shook her sugar-scoop bonnet at me, mournfully, and said something about a wicked and perverse generation, as if all mankind were standing in my gaiter boots, and she was rebuking it in a lump.

"Oh, sister!" says she, "if I could only make you see with my eyes, and hear with my ears! Why will you be so perverse? Have you no fear of the eternal flame that burneth and burneth forever?"

"Fear!" says I, a-looking up at the hot sun, and wiping my forehead. "I should think so! If all creation has a hotter place than this, I'm too big a coward to hurry that way. If there is an ice-house in the neighborhood, I should prefer that by all manner of means, by way of a punishment, if I deserve any."

"Ice!" says she, solemnly. "Ice! have you never read the Scriptures?"

"Several times," says I, with sarcastic forbearance. "My father had a book of that kind, which he sometimes opened."

She could not understand the delicate irony of this answer; but pressed forward like an old camp-meetinger as she was.

"Did that good father never read of a place where a drop of water could not be found to cool a certain person's tongue?" says she. "If not, your paternal ancestor fell short of his duty. It is no wonder his child should have gone half through life without a ray of saving grace, and with a white feather in her hat."

Sisters, I was riled. "Half through life," says I. "Madam, do you know how old I am?"

She looked at me half a minute, with all the eyes in her head; then, with the cool air of a woman counting money, said, "about for—"

Sisters, I cannot repeat the audacious falsehood of that creature's calculation. It was enough to rile up venom in the heart of a born cherubim. If ever a fiend took the disguise of a sugar-scoop bonnet, I have encountered one. A heart of stone lay under the innocent folds of that muslin half-shawl.

"Madam," said I, with a look of overpowering indignation, "you must have begun and ended your arithmetic in multiplication. Take off half of the years you have mentioned."

The woman smiled so knowingly, that I longed to— Well, no matter, she smiled, and says she:

"At any rate, you are not too old for the mercy-seat."

"I should think not," says I.

"Look yonder."

I looked at half a dozen children jumping, kneeling, praying, and singing before the revival tent, which had been so full of worrying noises all night long, that none of us had got a wink of sleep.

"Look," says she; "unless you are born again, and become like one of these, there will be no chance that you will ever enter the kingdom of Heaven."

I looked at the lovely children, and I looked at her.

"Excuse me," says I, "the object don't seem quite equal to the trouble. I have no notion of going backward in my life. In the first place I was too handsome a baby in the beginning to hanker after a change, and since then—I say nothing; but really, I have seen a good many people that claim to have been born again, and, so far as I can judge, they don't look a mite better, or a day younger, after taking all the trouble, which is discouraging."

"Discouraging!" said the woman; "why, you are talking of regeneration! Come—come with me to the anxious-seat—hundreds are flocking there now."

"Excuse me," says I, "if you please. Crabs may change their shells, and snakes creep out of their skins—I rather think they do sometimes—but born-again females look so much like the old pattern, that it don't seem to me worth trying after one is grown up."

"Many an older person than you are has been born again," says she.

"You don't say so," says I, a-fanning myself with a palm-leaf, for every drop of blood in my body grew hot when she talked about my age, and I was mad enough to bite a tenpenny nail in two with my front teeth.

"Yes, I do say so, humble as I am," says Sugar-scoop. "Look out there. See those women in Israel—three precious souls, just gathered into the fold. For two days they have been constantly at the redemption-seat. The spirit is upon them now. Their souls are struggling to be free. Before another morning they will be born again."

I looked at a group of women she pointed out, and the human nature within me yeasted over. They were three of the homeliest creatures I ever set eyes on—long and lank, with faces like sour baked-apples.

"Oh, my beloved sister," says Sugar-scoop, a-laying her cotton-gloved hand on mine; "can you look on that heavenly sight and not pray to be like unto them?"

I shook the cotton glove from my arm, and the hand that was in it, just as St. Paul shook off the viper.

"Like them, madam—like them! If I were one-half as lank and homely, I should want to be born again once a week, at least."

Sugar-scoop lifted both hands in awful horror.

"There are souls," says she, "given up to eternal darkness, I fear. Oh, sister, how I tremble for yours!"

I was trembling with indignation. What right had this woman to assault me in this fashion? I did not know her; she did not know me. My white feather was a badge of noble patriotism; my gaiter boots fitted a foot that has been an object of encomium with every shoemaker who has been honored by taking its measure—to say nothing of a glance given it by imperial eyes. Does religious zeal justify uncivil intrusion? What right had this sugar-scoopy woman to exhort me? How did she know that my heart was not already in the right path?

I asked this very question:

"Madam," says I, "by what right do you pretend to teach me, a stranger, of whose life you can know nothing?"

"I'm in the service of the Lord," says she, "looking up lost sheep. When I find one, torn and draggled with sin, it is my duty to drive it into the fold, where its fleece can be worked white as snow."

"But how can you tell? By what authority do you claim the right to judge of a person you have never seen?"

"Are we not told to go out into the highways and the hedges, and force them to come in?" says she.

"Whether they want to or not?" says I.

"Exactly," says she; "their not wanting to come into the fold shows the state of wickedness into which they have fallen."

"But how do you know that I am wicked?" says I.

She looked at me a long time, as if the idea were new to her. She had been so eager in raking up sinners, that it seemed to hurt her feelings to think that any human being she met wasn't on the high road to—well, what's its name?

"That feather," says she, "isn't a mark of regeneration."

"No," says I, "but it is the badge of a patriotic idea."

The creature didn't take in this delicate political hint. In fact, anything fine or keen is sure to puzzle your woman of one idea.

"Where do you go to meeting?" says she, as abrupt as a cracked stick.

"Where my father did, generally," says I.

She looked at me queerly from under her sugar-scoop.

"Haven't backslid, nor nothing; because, if you have, remember, before it is too late, that the last state of a backsliding sinner is worse than the first."