ng Indianapolis, the
tavern keeper's daughter, consented, at his request, to exchange her
leadership of fashionable society in Indianapolis for the lot of an
itinerant's wife, and to ride with him from Indianapolis to Madison on
horseback to enter upon her life work, she showed a greater heroism
than Edwin Ray ever did in his whole life; and when later she became his
strengthening angel, when poverty and actual want stared them in the
face, ministering by her heroic words when his own strong heart failed,
and with her own hands making calash bonnets for her neighbors to
prevent actual starvation, she became by far the more heroic of the two,
displaying a heroism which is not one whit abated as she waits for the
summons to call her from labor to reward.

Joseph Tarkington was a hero, but when Maria Slawson, that was, mounted
her horse with her bridal outfit on her back and in her saddle-bags for
a bridal tour from Switzerland county to Monroe, through the hills of
Brown county--when she rode all day in the rain, and sat up all night in
a salt boiler's shanty with nothing to eat but one biscuit in
twenty-four hours, she displayed the material that heroes are made of,
and yet there were many experiences no less trying than this, for that
heroic woman to pass through in those days--such as her heroic husband
never had to encounter.

Henry S. Talbott was one of the best preachers of his period, and one of
the most heroic. Unlike most of his contemporaries he left a lucrative
and promising business when he entered the traveling connection. He was
a physician with a profitable practice and a promising future when he
heroically forsook all for the special privations of an itinerant's life
as it was sixty years ago, and he heroically discharged the duties of
the calling for nearly a half century. But what of that wife, left
almost alone much of her time, with the cares and responsibilities of
ten children upon her hands? A section of her experience, and the
fortitude with which she bore it, would read like a fairy tale to this
generation, and she yet lives to bless her household and the world with
the sweetness of sanctified heroism.

And what is true of these is true of the whole family of preachers'
wives of that heroic period of Methodism. They were called to endure the
greater hardships and to bear the greater burdens, and they bore them
heroically. The husband in his rounds may sometimes have had to share
with his people