pay, but during a long life, in which he was
even more heroic as a faithful local preacher, with no pay at all. But,
tested by any human standard, that gifted and devoted wife exhibited
more of the stuff that heroes are made of, than he ever had occasion to
show. That he did a father's part well, none will deny, but it was
chiefly the mother's hand that so trained that family of six boys that
four of them became eminent and useful preachers, while the mother of
the Bovard family of preachers always owned her as her spiritual mother
and guide. Ah, Bene Hester was a hero!

A little later, but on the Wabash instead of on the Ohio, Daniel DeMotte
became a hero. He traveled large circuits, preached well, prayed well
and worked well. But, after all, who was Daniel DeMotte to begin with? A
fair tailor at the first, then a medium farmer, with all that being a
farmer meant on the Wabash sixty years ago. But he sacrificed all that
to become a traveling preacher. As a preacher he was faithful and
laborious, but he never worked harder or, personally, he never fared
harder as a preacher than he did as a farmer, while his sorest trials as
a preacher were always alleviated by attentions that amounted in many
cases almost to adoration. But what of his heroic wife and those eight
children, some of them strapping boys, and, judging from the way they
turned out, they were not spoiled by a disregard of Solomon's directions
as to boy culture. Of her descendants there are more than sixty
grand-children, and more than twenty of these are either preachers,
teachers or doctors, two being missionaries in China. Of only one is
there any occasion for the family to blush at the mention of his name.
One, the youngest of the eight, and who promised as well in boyhood as
any of them, was in his early manhood sent to----Congress, and he was a
member of that fool Indiana Senate last winter.

Let me not be understood as detracting one jot from the well deserved
fame of Daniel DeMotte. He was a hero among heroes fifty years ago. His
circuits were large and his salaries small, but that wife, that mother,
was the chief of heroes. Bishop Bowman well said of her at her funeral:
"She was a woman of no ordinary character, full of faith, patient,
quiet, cheerful, happy."

Edwin Ray, though he died young, was a great hero. Eloquent, energetic
and educated, he was second to none in everything which constituted a
real hero. But when Sally Nolan, the belle of you