ittaker. It was an address
given by this gentleman which had first made him wish to become a
public man.

When he called on Mr. Whittaker in Nottingham, as already related,
after some conversation had taken place, he remarked:--

"I should like to hear thee again, Tom".

"Well," remarked Whittaker as a joke, "you can if you go with me to
Derby."

John accepted the invitation forthwith, much to his friend's chagrin,
who was bothered to know what to do with him; for he was under the
impression that some members of the family where he expected to lodge
would not give a very hearty welcome to this rough fellow.

This is Mr. Whittaker's narrative of the sequel:--

"We walked together to Derby that day. At the meeting he spoke a
little, and pleased the people. When the meeting was over, he said:--

"'Can't I sleep with you?'

"'Well,' I said, 'I have no objection; but, you know, _I_ am only a
lodger.'

"However, go with me he _would_, and _did_. That was the man. When
John made up his mind to do a thing he did it; and to that feature in
his character, no doubt, much of his future success may be attributed.
The gentleman at whose house he met me at Nottingham, and who was
ashamed of him, subsequently became his servant, and touched his hat
to him; and John has pulled up at my own door in his carriage, with a
liveried servant, when I lived near to him in London."

John Cassell was now in the thick of the fight. In those days the
opposition to the Gospel of Temperance was keen and bitter. Sometimes
there were great disturbances at the meetings, sometimes he was pelted
with rubbish, at times he did not know where to turn for a night's
lodging. It was, on the whole, a fierce conflict; but John was nothing
daunted.

It is, of course, impossible to sum up the amount of a man's
influence. John Cassell scattered the seed of temperance liberally.
Here is a case showing how one of the grains took root, and grew up to
bear important fruit.

The Rev. Charles Garrett, the celebrated teetotal President of the
Wesleyan Conference, writing several years after John Cassell's death,
says:--

"I signed the pledge of total abstinence in 1840, after hearing a
lecture on the subject by the late John Cassell. I have therefore
tried it for more than thirty years. It has been a blessing to me, and
has made me a blessing to others."

How to cure the curse of drink, what to give in its place when the
pleasures of the glass were taken