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he was ready to admit any interest in religion but because he had promised his father to call on the chaplain. McIlvaine presented him with two tracts, requesting him to read one himself and to drop the other into the hand of someone who would benefit by it. The cadet promised compliance, and, perhaps in the spirit of sport, dropped the second tract, and popular summary of the evidences of Christianity, into the room of Leonidas Polk.

One week later Polk appeared in McIlvaine's quarters too choked with emotion for coherent speech. After several ineffectual attempts to make himself understood, he was finally able to stammer: "Tell me what I must do -- I have come about my soul. I know not what I want -- I am entirely in the dark. What must I seek? Where must I go?" He left the chaplain's study a confessed Christian, and forty days later he was baptized, together with another cadet, in the presence of the entire corps. The service for adult baptism had never been witnessed there before. It was an impressive scene, and all