Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/157

138 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS and the beloved oaptain's sword had been left in the tent. At the cost of his own life the boy went back to get the sword ; and the young captain was made to realize that the boy had something from the Book that all his philosophy could not give. From this night he dates his conversion and the birth of the future preacher. During all the many months in camp and in the long jour- ney with Sherman to Atlanta, the young captain did not lose sight of the time when the war would be ended and he should go back once more to the ways of peace. By the camp fire he read law. In his knapsack could generally be found a volume in small print of some one of the great poets of the day. Many of the long quotations of the great poets that roll from his lips today were learned in sight of opposing armies. Just before going to the army the neighboring town of Westfield had invited the young man, who had made quite a name for himself as an orator in his own community, to give a lecture. This was the day of great lecturers, and it was one of the boy's ambitions to be a lecturer like Wendell Phillips or Henry Ward Beecher. When the town of Westfield heard this first lecture of one of the boys from their own hills, they little realized that this boy to whom they were giving his first chance to make good, was to become the greatest lecturer of his age and one who would lecture to more audiences than any other man of his century. At the close of the war the young man soon did what a young man should. He married. Soon he became a news- paper reporter. Later he graduated from the Albany Law School, and, as it was the fashion for New Englanders to go west, he went to Minneapolis, opened his law office there, founding its first newspaper and its Young Men's Christian Association. Here we see his first effort to make it possible for young men to get some assistance toward an education, an idea that could not see its full fruition for many years. Later he was sent to Germany as an emigration agent for Minne- sota. Again, a year or two later, he made a tour of the world. These years abroad, with his keenly alert mind, filled his brain with images and scenes that were to be given back