XI.—A Soldier of the Cross. Under Arrest for Absence Without Leave. Order of Court Reversed by President. Certificate from State Legislature of Massachusetts for Patriotic Services. Appointed by President Lincoln, Lieutenant-Colonel on General McPherson's Staff. Wounded at Kenesaw Mountain. Conversion. Public Profession of Faith.

Chapter XII.—Westward. Resignation from Army. Admission to Bar. Marriage. Removal to Minnesota. Founding of the Minneapolis Y.M.C.A. and of the Present "Minneapolis Tribune." Burning of Home. Breaking Out of Wound. Appointed Emigration Agent to Germany by Governor of Minnesota. Joins Surveying Party to Palestine. Near to Death in Paris Hospital. Journey to New York for Operation in Bellevue Hospital. Return to Boston.

Chapter XIII.—Writing His Way Around the World. Days of Poverty in Boston. Sent to Southern Battlefields. Around the World for New York and Boston Papers. In a Gambling Den in Hong Kong, China. Cholera and Shipwreck.

Chapter XIV.—Busy Days in Boston. Editor of "Boston Traveller." Free Legal Advice for the Poor. Temperance Work. Campaign Manager for General Nathaniel P. Banks. Urged for Consulship at Naples. His Work for the Widows and Orphans of Soldiers.

Chapter XV.—Troubled Days. Death of Wife. Loss of Money. Preaching on Wharves. Growth of Sunday School Class at Tremont Temple from Four to Six Hundred Members in a Brief Time. Second Marriage. Death of Father and Mother. Preaching at Lexington. Building Lexington Baptist Church.

Chapter XVI.—His Entry Into the Ministry. Ordination. First Charge at Lexington. Call to Grace Baptist Church, Philadelphia.

Chapter XVII.—Going to Philadelphia. The Early History of Grace Baptist Church. The Beginning of the Sunday Breakfast Association. Impressions of a Sunday Service.

Chapter XVIII.—First Days at Grace Baptist Church. Early Plans for Church Efficiency. Practical Methods for.

Chapter XXXI.—The Manner of the Message. The Style of the Sermons. Their Subject Matter. Preaching to Help Some Individual Church Member.

Chapter XXXII.—These Busy Later Days. A Typical Week Day. A Typical Sunday. Mrs. Conwell. Back to the Berkshires in Summer for Rest.

Chapter XXXIII.—As a Lecturer. Wide Fame as a Lecturer. Date of Entrance on Lecture Platform. Number of Lectures Given. The Press on His Lectures. Some Instances of How His Lectures Have Helped People. Address at Banquet to President McKinley.

Chapter XXXIV.—As a Writer. Rapid Method of Working. A Popular Biographical Writer. The Books He has Written.

Chapter XXXV.—A Home Coming. Reception Tendered by Citizens of Philadelphia in Acknowledgment of Work as Public Benefactor.

Chapter XXXVI.—The Path That Has Been Blazed. Problems That Need Solving. The Need of Men Able to Solve Them.

Acres of Diamonds.

Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women.

[Illustration: MARTIN CONWELL]

CHAPTER I

ANCESTRY

John Conwell, the English Ancestor who fought for the Preservation of the English Language. Martin Conwell of Maryland. A Runaway Marriage. The Parents of Russell Conwell.

When the Norman-French overran England and threatened to sweep from out the island the English language, many time-honored English customs, and all that those loyal early Britons held dear, a doughty Englishman, John Conwell, took up cudgels in their defence. Long and bitter was the struggle he waged to preserve the English language. Insidious and steady were the encroachments of the Norman-French tongue. The storm centre was the Castle school, for John Conwell realized that the language of the child of to-day is the language of the man of to-morrow. Right royal was the battle, for it was in those old feudal days of strong feeling and bitter, bloody partisanship. But this plucky Briton stood to his guns until he won. Norman-French was beaten back, English was taught in the schools, and preserved in the speech of that day.

It was a tale that was told his children and his children's children. It was a tradition that grew into their blood—the story of perseverance, the story of a fight against oppression and injustice. "Blood" is after all but family traditions and family ideals, and this fighting ancestor handed down to his descendants an inheritance of greater worth than royal lineage or feudal castle. The centuries rolled away, a new world was discovered, and the progressive, energetic Conwell family were not to be held back when adventure beckoned. Two members of it came to America. Courage of a high order, enthusiasm, faith, must they have had, or the call to cross a perilous, pathless ocean, to brave unknown dangers in a new world would have found no response in their hearts. They settled in Maryland and into this fighting pioneer blood entered that strange magic influence of the South, which makes for romance, for imagination, for the poetic and ideal in temperament.

[Illustration: MIRANDA CONWELL]

Of this family came Martin Conwell, of Baltimore, hot-blooded, proud, who in 1810, visiting a college chum in western Massachusetts, met and fell in love with a New England girl, Miss Hannah Niles. She was already engaged to a neighbor's son, but the Southerner cared naught for a rival. He wooed earnestly, passionately. He soon swept away her protests, won her heart and the two ran away and were married. But tragic days were ahead. On her return her incensed father locked her in her room and by threats and force compelled her to write a note to her young husband renouncing him. He would accept no such message, but sent a note imploring a meeting in a nearby schoolhouse at nightfall. The letter fell into the father's hands. He compelled her to write a curt reply bidding him leave her "forever." Then the father locked the daughter safely in the attic, and with a mob led by the rejected suitor, surrounded the schoolhouse and burnt it to the ground. The husband, thinking he had been heartlessly forsaken, made a brave fight against the odds, but seeing no hope of success, leaped from the burning building, amid the shots fired at him, escaped down a rocky embankment at the back of the schoolhouse, and under cover of the woods, fled. They told his wife that he was dead.

A little son came to brighten her shadowed life, whom she named, after him, Martin Conwell; and after seven years she married her early lover. But Martin was the son of her first husband and always her dearest child, and day after day when old and gray and again a widow, she would come over the New England hills, a little lonely old woman, to sit by his fireside and dream of those bygone days that were so sweet.

Too proud to again seek an explanation, Martin Conwell, her husband, returned to his Maryland home, living a lonely, bitter life, believing to the day of his death, thirty years later, that his young wife had repudiated and betrayed him.

Martin Conwell, the son, grew to manhood and in 1839 brought a bride to a little farm he had purchased at South Worthington, up in the Hampshire Highlands of the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts. Here and there among these hills, along the swift mountain streams, the land sweeps out into sunny little meadows filled in summer with rich, tender grasses, starred with flowers. It is not a fertile land. The rocks creep out with frequent and unpleasing persistency. But Martin Conwell viewed life cheerfully, and being an ingenious man, added to the business of farming, several other occupations, and so managed to make a living, and after many years to pay the mortgage on his home which came with the purchase. The little