was sufficient that they came in the name of a Methodist preacher. These heroes were not always the richest men of their several neighborhoods, nor of the church, but, honoring God with their substance they not only prospered in worldly goods, but as a rule they gave to the church and to the world a race of stalwart Christian men and women, who, following in the footsteps of their fathers, felt it a pleasure to do for the church. Three-fourths of the early students of this University came from homes that had been open to the early traveling preachers, and the generation of preachers and the preachers' wives just passing away was recruited almost wholly from them, and the later generations of students and preachers, and preachers' wives, not to mention the men who are foremost in all honorable callings, are largely the grand-children and great-grand-children of these same devoted heroic men.

Indelibly engraven upon the tablet of my memory is one such cabin, which in many respects represents hundreds. In 1840, among the hills of Dearborn county, on my first round on the Rising Sun circuit, I preached at it. The congregation was composed of primitive country people, mostly dressed in homespun. I had never seen one of them before, but the entire class had turned out to hear the new boy preacher, filling every chair, even the one behind which I was to stand, and every bench that had been provided was full, and the sides of each of the two beds in the room, and some were standing. Among these was a gawky youth, about twenty years of age, green—that is, immature—in appearance, and dressed in store clothes. I noticed that after meeting, with a great many others, he stayed to dinner. Later on I learned that he was a son of the heroic man and woman whose house had been open for years for preaching and for the entertainment of preachers, and that he was at that time studying law in Wilmington, which accounted for his wearing store clothes. Years passed, and that green boy ripened and developed, and he went out into the world to become a Circuit Judge, a State Senator, a Supreme Judge, and he has been for nine years the honored Dean of the School of Law in De Pauw University.

But the opening of their doors for preaching was not all. Sometimes these same heroes would entertain an entire quarterly meeting, and a great part of a camp-meeting when it was expected that tent-holders would feed all who were not tent-holders. Was not he a hero who would, year after year, not merely kill the fatted calf for a quarterly or camp-meeting, but the yearling, and provide as liberally of other things required for entertaining the guests and their horses, and yet keep open house, day and night, for the gratuitous entertainment of preachers? No traveling preacher ever displayed greater heroism than these truly great men, and yet they were not the greatest heroes of that heroic age. Such sacrifices as they made from year to year are not to be lightly esteemed, yet the supplying of the larder and of the crib was the smallest part of the sacrifice required for such an offering to the Lord. Was the cooking for twenty to fifty at a quarterly or camp-meeting, or the care of the guests whom the open house invited, to be counted as second to any work done for the church? Let it be borne in mind that these demands were made before the introduction of cooking stoves and other appliances for making housekeeping easy. The meals for those quarterly meetings were cooked by the open fireplace, before and over a huge log fire, often without the aid even of a crane, and at the camp-meeting by the side of a big log used as a kitchen. Looking back through the years, and having been in position to observe every type of church work, and every class of church workers, from the early bishops on their long horseback tours; and the early presiding elders, going the rounds of their large districts; and the early circuit riders, preaching twenty-five to thirty times every four weeks, and traveling hundreds of miles on each round; and the early local preachers, with their gratuitous work, often without even thanks, and the large-hearted men who not only contributed of their substance toward the payment of salaries and such benevolences as were then required, but who provided liberally and cheerfully, also, for the entertainment of these bishops, and elders, and preachers, I am prepared to say that the very highest and purest type of heroism ever displayed in early Methodism in Indiana was shown by the women who set the tables and cooked the food and prepared the beds for these wayfaring men. And their name was legion. Every circuit had one or more, though unavoidably and without rivalry some one easily ranked all contemporaries of any given neighborhood, and some, from position as well as real merit, acquired almost a national reputation, so that a strange preacher or a bishop would be directed, when hundreds of miles distant, to what were known as "Methodist taverns," by the way. The presiding elder, before leaving home for a series of quarterly meetings, always mapped out his journey with reference to these "taverns," and the retiring preacher gave a list of them to his successor with the plan of his circuit, and a long horseback journey to conference was always arranged so as to strike one of these at or about noon or night, and as they were not always located with reference to such emergencies, this very often made an extra dinner or extra supper, or an early or late breakfast, a necessity, imposing an amount of extra labor upon the generous housewife that few are now aware of, and which tested her heroism as a face to face encounter in battle tests the heroism of the soldier. To call the roll of these heroes would be impossible, yet some so stand out in the unwritten history of Indiana Methodism that I can not avoid the mention of Mrs. John Wilkins, of Indianapolis, whose hospitable door was always open to the Methodist preachers of that heroic period, whether they came as bishops, or elders, or circuit riders, and her central position made her house almost an open one. Mrs. Isaac Dunn, at Lawrenceburg; Mrs. Caleb A. Craft, at Rising Sun; Mrs. Charles Basnett, at Madison, and Mrs. Roland T. Carr, at Rushville. But I can not name them all. There were thousands of them. They bore the very heaviest burdens of their times; and yet, outside of the little family circle that knew what was involved in their toils and sacrifices, no one ever seemed to care for them or sympathize with them. The men who received these hospitalities were rated as the heroes, while what these women did or suffered was counted of little worth, or certainly only as commonplace; yet they were the greater heroes by far, if for no other reason, yet, because their labors were even harder than the labors of others, and quite as essential to results, and wholly without compensation—even the moral compensation which comes from realizing that the eyes of approbation are upon you—the only eye that seemed to see them was the eye of the Father in Heaven. It took the stuff that heroes are made of to endure all this, yet they endured it for years and until the necessity for such service had passed.

Merely as a specimen of this line of service, let me lift the curtain and introduce you to the inner life of one of these heroes as I knew it for fifty years or more. We are familiar with the deeds of those who have been voted the heroes of early Methodism, but no one has ever told what were the sacrifices and hardships of the heroic women, whose time and strength were devoted to the same cause, in a less conspicuous way.

While Indiana was yet a Territory, and her one-roomed house, with a half-story above, was yet unfinished, and while the Indian reservation, yet inhabited by the Delawares, was less than two miles distant, and no Methodist preaching had yet been established in Brookville, my mother opened her doors