ese
readings went on, all through the happy days of childhood.

Interesting things were happening in the world then; things that were
to mould the future of one of the boys at her knee in a way she little
dreamed. A war was being waged in Mexico to train soldiers for a
greater war coming. Out in Illinois, a plain rail-splitter, farmer and
lawyer was beginning to be heard in the cause of freedom and justice
for all men, black or white. These rumors and discussions drifted into
the little home and arguments rose high around the crackling woodfire
as neighbors dropped in. Martin Conwell was not a man to watch
passively the trend of events. He took sides openly, vigorously, and
though the small, blue-eyed boy listening so attentively did not
comprehend all that it was about, Martin Conwell's views later took
shape in action that had a marked bearing on Russell's later life.

But the mother's reading bore more immediate, if less useful, fruit.
Hearing rather unusual sounds from the back yard one day, she went
to the door to listen. The evening before she had been reading the
children one of the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and telling them
something of this great man and his work. Mounted upon one of the
largest gray rocks in the yard, stood Russell, solemnly preaching to
a collection of wondering, round-eyed chickens. It was a serious,
impressive discourse he gave them, much of it, no doubt, a transcript
of Henry Ward Beecher's. What led his boyish fancy to do it, no
one knew, though many another child has done the same, as children
dramatize in play the things they have heard or read. But a chance
remark stamped that childish action upon the boyish imagination,
making it the corner stone of many a childish castle in Spain. Telling
her husband of it in the evening, Miranda Conwell said, half jokingly,
"our boy will some day be a great preacher." It was a fertile seed
dropped in a fertile mind, tilled assiduously for a brief space by
vivid childish imagination; but not ripened till sad experiences of
later years brought it to a glorious fruition.

Another result of the fireside readings might have been serious. A
short distance from the house a mountain stream leaps and foams over
the stones, seeming to choose, as Ruskin says, "the steepest places
to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering its handfuls of
crystal this way and that as the wind takes them." The walls of the
gorge rise sheer and steep; the path of t