Very well, then; this is J.W. at eighteen; a young fellow worth knowing.  Take a look at him; impulsive, generous, not what you would call handsome, but possessed of a genial eye and a ready tongue, a stubby nose and a few scattered freckles.  A fair student, he is yet far from bookishness, and he makes friends easily.

Of late he has been paying furtive but detailed attention to his hair and his neckties and the hang of his clothes, though still in small danger of being mistaken for a tailor’s model.

With such a name you will understand that he’s a Methodist by first intention; born so.  He is a pretty sturdy young Christian, showing it in a boy’s modest but direct fashion, which even his teammates of the high-school football squad found it no trouble to tolerate, because they knew him for a human, healthy boy, and not a morbid, self-inspecting religious prig.  Pastor Drury, you may be sure, had taken note of all that, for he and J.W. had been fast friends since the day he had received the boy into the church.

The morning after the Institute social J.W. announced at breakfast his sudden change of plan.

“If you don’t mind, Dad, I’ve about decided to go to the Institute instead of Chicago.  There is a bunch of us going, and Mr. Drury will be there.  Uncle Henry’s folks might not want to be bothered with me now, and anyway I don’t know them very well.  But I can go to the Institute with the church crowd; and there will be tennis and swimming and plenty of other fun besides the big program.”  Which was quite a speech for J. W.

John Wesley, Sr., didn’t know much about the Institute, but he had an endless regard for his pastor, and the mother was characteristically willing to postpone her boy’s introduction to the unknown and, in her thought, therefore, the menacing city.

So, after the brief but unhurried devotions at the breakfast table, which had come to serve in place of the old-time family prayers, parental approval was forthcoming.  And thus it befell that J.W. selected for himself a future whose every experience was to be affected by so slight a matter as his impulsive choice of a week’s holiday.  That choice expressed to him the new freedom of his years, for he had not even been conscious of the quiet influence which had made it easier than he knew to decide as he had done.

* * * * *

It was a mixed and lively company that found itself crowded around the registrar’s table at the Institute one Monday evening in July, with J. W. and his own particular chum, Martin Luther Shenk, better known as “Marty,” right in the middle of it.

J.W. wondered where so many Epworthians could have come from.  Did they really hanker after the Institute, or had they come for reasons as trivial as his own?  He put the question to Martin Luther Shenk.

“Marty, do you reckon these are all here for real Epworth League work, or does the Institute want anybody and everybody?”