CHAPTER X.
AT HER GATES We shape ourselves the joy or tear, Of which the coming life is made; And fill our future atmosphere With sunshine or with shade.
It was just at the edge of the dark when John left his mother.

He had perhaps been strengthened by her counsel, but he had not been comforted.
In Hatton market-place he saw a large gathering of men and women and heard Greenwood in a passionate tone talking to them.

Very soon a voice, almost equally powerful, started what appeared to be a hymn, and John rode closer to the crowd and listened.
"The Day of the Lord is at hand, at hand, His storms roll up the sky; The nations sleep starving on heaps of gold, The dreamers toss and sigh.
The night is darkest before the morn, When the pain is sorest the child is born, And the Day of the Lord is at hand.
"Gather you, gather you, hounds of hell, Famine, and Plague, and War, Idleness, Bigotry, Cant and Misrule, Gather, and fall in the snare.
Hireling and Mammonite, Bigot and Knave, Crawl to the battlefield, sneak to your grave, In the Day of the Lord at hand." John did not hear Greenwood's voice among the singers, but at the close of the second verse it rose above all others.

"Lads and lasses of the chapel singing-pew," he cried, "we will better that kind of stuff.

Sing up to the tune of Olivet," and to this majestic melody he started in a clarion-like voice Toplady's splendid hymn, "Lo! He comes with clouds descending, Once for favored sinners slain, Thousand, thousand saints attending, Swell the triumph of his train.
Hallelujah! God appears on earth to reign." The words were as familiar as their mother tongue, and Greenwood's authoritative voice in chapel, mill, and trade meetings, was quite as intimate and potential.