others that he must do all in his power to relieve even his comrades in the war when, injured or ill, what mental anguish must he have endured when his dearly loved wife was in want and he so powerless to relieve it.  She read his heart with the sure sympathy of love, knew his bitter anguish of spirit, and suffered the more because he suffered.  But bravely she cheered him, encouraged him, and spent all her own spare minutes doing what she could to add to the family income.

Thus they pluckily-worked, never repining nor complaining at fate, though knowing in its bitterest sense what it is to be desperately poor, to suffer for adequate food and clothing.  Colonel Conwell learned in that hard experience what it is to want for a crust of bread.  No man can come to Dr. Conwell to this day with a tale of poverty, suffering, sickness, but what the minister’s eyes turn backward to that one little room with its pitiful makeshifts of furniture, its brave, pale wife, the wee girl baby; and his hand goes out to help with an earnest and heartfelt sympathy surprising to the recipient.

But the tide turned ere long.  Colonel Conwell’s work on the paper soon began to tell.  His salary was raised and raised, until comfort once more with smiling face took up her abode with them.  They moved into a pretty home in Somerville.  Colonel Conwell resumed his law practice and began, as in the West, to deal in real estate.  He also continued his lecturing.

Busy days these were, but his life had already taught him much of the art of filling each minute to an exact nicety in order to get the most out of it.  His paper sent him as a special correspondent to write up the battlefields of the South, and his letters were so graphic and entertaining as to become a widely known and much discussed feature of the paper.  Soldiers everywhere read them with eager delight and through them revisited the scenes of the terrible conflict in which each had played some part.  While on this assignment, he invaded a gambling den in New Orleans, and interfering to save a colored man from the drunken frenzy of a bully, came near being killed himself.  Coming to the aid of a porter on a Mississippi steamboat, he again narrowly escaped being shot, striking a revolver from the hand of a ruffian just as his finger dropped on the trigger.  He mixed with all classes and conditions of men and saw life in its roughest, most primal aspect But all these experiences helped him to that appreciation of human nature that has been of such, value and help to him since.

These letters aroused such widespread and favorable comment that the “New York Tribune” and “Boston Traveller” arranged to send him on a tour of the world.  When the offer came to him, his mind leaped the years to that poorly furnished room in the little farmhouse, where he had leaned on his mother’s knee and listened with rapt attention while she read him the letters of foreign correspondents in that very “New York Tribune.”  The letter he wrote his mother telling her of the appointment was full of loving gratitude for the careful way she had trained his tastes in those days when he was too young and inexperienced to choose for himself.