preach to large congregations and to be caressed everywhere by loving
and admiring friends, pursuing congenial studies under more favorable
surroundings than his farm ever could have afforded, let us look in upon
that heroic wife with her family of five children, increased ultimately
to ten, and for many years almost wholly unaided by the presence or
counsel of the husband, or by any considerable material aid from him. It
was hers, there alone on that farm, not only to spin, and weave, and
make, and mend, and cook, and wash for those children, but to train them
for the church and for God. Was not she the greater hero of the two? Did
not the patient endurance, which for years added new acres to the
fields, as well as new children to the family, call into exercise the
very highest qualities of heroism? Her door was not only always open to
the wayfaring preacher, but her cabin, and later her larger frame house,
was the neighborhood chapel, until, with very little help from her
neighbors, she built a log chapel on her own farm for the accommodation
of the church which was in her own house; and such was her fidelity and
her ability as well, that those children all became religious, and three
of them became able ministers of the gospel, one of them serving long
and well as a professor in this university. Meanwhile she took an active
part in every social enterprise of the times in the neighborhood. She
attended quilting bees in the neighborhood and had them in her own
cabin, and she was a ministering angel at the bedside of the sick and
the dying; so taking the lead in the early temperance work, that she was
the first one who dared to have a company of neighbor women without the
inevitable punch and toddy. We need not detract one iota from the
well-earned laurels of that great and good man, to say that the greater
hero of the twain was that faithful, uncomplaining wife: and that, great
as were his labors, hers were much greater, and all the more heroic
because they were unobserved and unapplauded. If heroism consists in
"the braving of difficulties with a noble devotion to some great cause,
and a just confidence of being able to meet dangers in the spirit of
such a cause," then was Mrs. Allen Wiley a hero second to none.

George K. Hester is a name much reverenced among early Indiana
preachers. Beginning only a few years later than Wiley, his manner of
life was substantially the same as Wiley's--large circuits, long rides
and