forest resounded with his cries for mercy.  When he found peace, it swelled into rapture.  He joined the Church militant among the Methodists, and he stuck to them, quarreled with them, and loved them, all his life.  He had many troubles, and gave much trouble to many people.  The old Adam died hard in the fighting blacksmith.  His pastor, his family, his friends, his fellow-members in the Church, all got a portion of his wrath in due season, if they swerved a hair-breadth from the straight-line of duty as he saw it.  I was his pastor, and I never had a truer friend, or a severer censor.  One Sunday morning he electrified my congregation, at the close of the sermon, by rising in his place and making a personal application of a portion of it to individuals present, and insisting on their immediate expulsion from the Church.  He had another side to his character, and at times was as tender as a woman.  He acted as class-leader.  In his melting moods he moved every eye to tears, as he passed round among the brethren and sisters, weeping, exhorting, and rejoicing.  At such times, his great voice softened into a pathos that none could resist, and swept the chords of sympathy with resistless power.  But when his other mood was upon him, he was fearful.  He scourged the unfaithful with a whip of fire.  He would quote with a singular fluency and aptness every passage of Scripture that blasted hypocrites, reproved the lukewarm, or threatened damnation to the sinner.  At such times his voice sounded like the shout of a warrior in battle, and the timid and wondering hearers looked as if they were in the midst of the thunder and lightning of a tropical storm.  I remember the shock he gave a quiet and timid lady whom I had persuaded to remain for the class-meeting after service.  Fixing his stern and fiery gaze upon her, and knitting his great bushy eyebrows, he thundered the question: 

“Sister, do you ever pray?”

The startled woman nearly sprang from her seat in a panic as she stammered hurriedly,

“Yes, sir; yes, sir.”

She did not attend his class-meeting again.

At a camp-meeting he was present, and in one of his bitterest moods.  The meeting was not conducted in a way to suit him.  He was grim, critical, and contemptuous, making no concealment of his dissatisfaction.  The preaching displeased him particularly.  He groaned, frowned, and in other ways showed his feelings.  At length he could stand it no longer.  A young brother had just closed a sermon of a mild and persuasive kind, and no sooner had he taken his seat than the old man arose.  Looking forth upon the vast audience, and then casting a sharp and scornful glance at the preachers in and around “the stand,” he said: 

“You preachers of these days have no gospel in you.  You remind me of a man going into his barnyard early in the morning to feed his stock.  He has a basket on his arm, and here come the horses nickering, the cows lowing, the calves and sheep bleating, the hogs squealing, the turkeys gobbling, the hens clucking, and the roosters crowing.  They all gather round him, expecting to be fed, and lo, his basket is empty!  You take texts, and you preach, but you have no gospel.  Your baskets are empty.”