This was the advent of a new life to me.  I was taken in hand by the head groom and fitted out with two suits of clothes, and in this change the first great ambition of my life was satisfied.  I became the possessor of a hard hat.  For two years, I had instinctively longed for something on my head that I could politely remove to a lady.  The first night I marched down that village street, shoes well polished, starched linen, and hard hat, I expected the whole town to be there to see me.  I had made several attempts at this hat business before.  They organized a flute band in the town and I joined it for the sake of the hat.  But it was too nice a thing to be lying around when people were hungry, and, as it was in pawn most of the time, I finally redeemed it, returned it, and quit.  But this time the hat had come to stay.

With my new vision still warm in my heart, I became very active in the parish Sunday School.  My inability to read relegated me to the children’s class; but I had a retentive memory, and before I was able to read, I memorized about three hundred texts from the Bible.

The first outworking of my vision was on a drunken stone mason of our town.  His family, relatives, and friends had all given him up.  He had given himself up.  I went after him every night for weeks; talked to him, pleaded with him, prayed for him, and was rewarded by seeing him make a new start.  Together we organized a temperance society.  I think it was the first temperance society in that town.  I was much more at home in this kind of work than in the Sunday School; for, while I could be neither secretary, treasurer, nor president of the temperance society I had organized, my inability to read or write did not prevent me from hustling after such men as my first convert.

In the Sunday School, I felt keenly the fact that I was outclassed by boys half my age; but I persevered and went from one class to another, until I had gone through the grades, and was then given the opportunity to organize a class of my own.  This I did with the material on the streets, children unconnected with any school or institution.  I taught them the Bible stories and helped them to memorize the texts that I had learned myself.

Despite the fact that I was now clean and well groomed, I could not help comparing my life to the life of the horses I was attending, especially with regard to their sleeping accommodations.  The slightest speck of dirt of any kind around their bedding was an indictment of the grooming.  The stables were beautifully flagged and sprinkled with fine, white sand.  The mangers were kept cleaner than anything in the houses of the poor, and, when I trotted a mount out into the yard, the master would take out his white silk handkerchief, run it along the horse’s side, and then examine it.  If the handkerchief was soiled in the slightest degree, the horse was sent back.  Probably not once in a year was a horse returned under such circumstances.  The regularity of meals was another point of comparison, and the daily washings, brushings, groomings.