substance they not only prospered in worldly
goods, but as a rule they gave to the church and to the world a race of
stalwart Christian men and women, who, following in the footsteps of
their fathers, felt it a pleasure to do for the church. Three-fourths of
the early students of this University came from homes that had been open
to the early traveling preachers, and the generation of preachers and
the preachers' wives just passing away was recruited almost wholly from
them, and the later generations of students and preachers, and
preachers' wives, not to mention the men who are foremost in all
honorable callings, are largely the grand-children and
great-grand-children of these same devoted heroic men.

Indelibly engraven upon the tablet of my memory is one such cabin, which
in many respects represents hundreds. In 1840, among the hills of
Dearborn county, on my first round on the Rising Sun circuit, I preached
at it. The congregation was composed of primitive country people, mostly
dressed in homespun. I had never seen one of them before, but the entire
class had turned out to hear the new boy preacher, filling every chair,
even the one behind which I was to stand, and every bench that had been
provided was full, and the sides of each of the two beds in the room,
and some were standing. Among these was a gawky youth, about twenty
years of age, green--that is, immature--in appearance, and dressed in
store clothes. I noticed that after meeting, with a great many others,
he stayed to dinner. Later on I learned that he was a son of the heroic
man and woman whose house had been open for years for preaching and for
the entertainment of preachers, and that he was at that time studying
law in Wilmington, which accounted for his wearing store clothes. Years
passed, and that green boy ripened and developed, and he went out into
the world to become a Circuit Judge, a State Senator, a Supreme Judge,
and he has been for nine years the honored Dean of the School of Law in
De Pauw University.

But the opening of their doors for preaching was not all. Sometimes
these same heroes would entertain an entire quarterly meeting, and a
great part of a camp-meeting when it was expected that tent-holders
would feed all who were not tent-holders. Was not he a hero who would,
year after year, not merely kill the fatted calf for a quarterly or
camp-meeting, but the yearling, and provide as liberally of other things
required for entertaining the