THE SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT Ulster Day, Saturday the 28th of September, 1912, was kept as a day of religious observance by the Northern Loyalists.

So far as the Protestants of all denominations were concerned, Ulster was a province at prayer on that memorable Saturday morning.

In Belfast, not only the services which had more or less of an official character--those held in the Cathedral, in the Ulster Hall, in the Assembly Hall--but those held in nearly all the places of worship in the city, were crowded with reverent worshippers.

It was the same throughout the country towns and rural districts--there was hardly a village or hamlet where the parish church and the Presbyterian and Methodist meeting-houses were not attended by congregations of unwonted numbers and fervour.

Not that there was any of the religious excitement such as accompanies revivalist meetings; it was simply that a population, naturally religious-minded, turned instinctively to divine worship as the fitting expression of common emotion at a moment of critical gravity in their history.