" he remembers asking when he was a
little boy. And he was told that it was for the husband of her youth.

We went back into the little house, and he showed me the room in which
he first saw John Brown. "I came down early one morning, and saw a huge,
hairy man sprawled upon the bed there--and I was frightened," he says.

But John Brown did not long frighten him! For he was much at their house
after that, and was so friendly with Russell and his brother that
there was no chance for awe; and it gives a curious side-light on the
character of the stern abolitionist that he actually, with infinite
patience, taught the old horse of the Conwells to go home alone with
the wagon after leaving the boys at school, a mile or more away, and at
school-closing time to trot gently off for them without a driver when
merely faced in that direction and told to go! Conwell remembers how
John Brown, in training it, used patiently to walk beside the horse, and
control its going and its turnings, until it was quite ready to go and
turn entirely by itself.

The Conwell house was a station on the Underground Railway, and Russell
Conwell remembers, when a lad, seeing the escaping slaves that his
father had driven across country and temporarily hidden. "Those were
heroic days," he says, quietly. "And once in a while my father let me
go with him. They were wonderful night drives--the cowering slaves, the
darkness of the road, the caution and the silence and dread of it all."
This underground route, he remembers, was from Philadelphia to New
Haven, thence to Springfield, where Conwell's father would take his
charge, and onward to Bellows Falls and Canada.

Conwell tells, too, of meeting Frederick Douglass, the colored orator,
in that little cottage in the hills. "'I never saw my father,' Douglass
said one day--his father was a white man--'and I remember little of my
mother except that once she tried to keep an overseer from whipping me,
and the lash cut across her own face, and her blood fell over me.'

"When John Brown was captured," Conwell went on, "my father tried to
sell this place to get a little money to send to help his defense. But
he couldn't sell it, and on the day of the execution we knelt solemnly
here, from eleven to twelve, just praying, praying in silence for the
passing soul of John Brown. And as we prayed we knew that others were
also praying, for a church-bell tolled during that entire hour, and its
awesome boom went sadly so