ference and about one-half
of the Southeast, requiring him to be absent from home three months at a
time; and how he studied Latin and Greek and Hebrew on horseback, or by
the light of the settler's fire, or of an improvised lamp made of a
saucer or scraped turnip filled with hog's lard, and with a rag for a
wick. But who was Allen Wiley to begin with? What sacrifices did he make
for the opportunity to study Latin and Greek and Hebrew even under these
difficulties? He was an average farmer on a quarter section of only
medium land in Switzerland county, living in a cabin two miles from any
neighbor. By the dint of hard work, chopping or plowing by day, and
burning brush, or husking corn, or making splint brooms, or pounding
hominy, by night, he was succeeding in feeding his wife and Five
children, and in adding a few additional acres to his cleared land every
year; studying English grammar by taking his book to the field when
plowing, or to the woods when chopping; and preaching acceptably as a
local preacher in his own cabin, or in some neighboring cabin, on
Sundays. Did it require any great heroism to exchange all these for the
less laborious but more conspicuous calling of a traveling preacher,
uninviting as that calling was at that period, yet furnishing
opportunities for mental improvement such as his soul longed for? Nay,
rather, was not he the greater hero who remained among the untitled and
comparatively unknown laymen, and faithfully discharged the duties of a
layman, unsupported by the up-bearing pressure which comes of fame?
Allen Wiley sacrificed the hardships of a frontier farmer, with its
huskings and log-rollings and house-raisings, for the position of a
traveling preacher, with its opportunities to study and with the best
entertainment that the country afforded. But what of that wife whom he
left in that cabin, two miles from any neighbor, with five small
children, not one of whom was old enough to render any aid toward the
support of the family? And it was not grudgingly nor of constraint that
she gave him up to the work of the ministry; but, on the contrary,
knowing the desire of his heart to be wholly devoted to the ministry,
she long prayed that a door might be opened to him, so that when he
consented to go into the work, if his wife would consent, he was cheered
onward from the first by her God-speed and prayers. Leaving the heroic
husband, the growing and popular preacher, to travel long journeys, to