s journey with
reference to these "taverns," and the retiring preacher gave a list of
them to his successor with the plan of his circuit, and a long horseback
journey to conference was always arranged so as to strike one of these
at or about noon or night, and as they were not always located with
reference to such emergencies, this very often made an extra dinner or
extra supper, or an early or late breakfast, a necessity, imposing an
amount of extra labor upon the generous housewife that few are now aware
of, and which tested her heroism as a face to face encounter in battle
tests the heroism of the soldier. To call the roll of these heroes would
be impossible, yet some so stand out in the unwritten history of Indiana
Methodism that I can not avoid the mention of Mrs. John Wilkins, of
Indianapolis, whose hospitable door was always open to the Methodist
preachers of that heroic period, whether they came as bishops, or
elders, or circuit riders, and her central position made her house
almost an open one. Mrs. Isaac Dunn, at Lawrenceburg; Mrs. Caleb A.
Craft, at Rising Sun; Mrs. Charles Basnett, at Madison, and Mrs. Roland
T. Carr, at Rushville. But I can not name them all. There were thousands
of them. They bore the very heaviest burdens of their times; and yet,
outside of the little family circle that knew what was involved in their
toils and sacrifices, no one ever seemed to care for them or sympathize
with them. The men who received these hospitalities were rated as the
heroes, while what these women did or suffered was counted of little
worth, or certainly only as commonplace; yet they were the greater
heroes by far, if for no other reason, yet, because their labors were
even harder than the labors of others, and quite as essential to
results, and wholly without compensation--even the moral compensation
which comes from realizing that the eyes of approbation are upon
you--the only eye that seemed to see them was the eye of the Father in
Heaven. It took the stuff that heroes are made of to endure all this,
yet they endured it for years and until the necessity for such service
had passed.

Merely as a specimen of this line of service, let me lift the curtain
and introduce you to the inner life of one of these heroes as I knew it
for fifty years or more. We are familiar with the deeds of those who
have been voted the heroes of early Methodism, but no one has ever told
what were the sacrifices and hardships of the heroic