n bonds crying, "Come over and help us."

When Lincoln made his great address in Cooper Institute in 1860,
Russell was there. It was a longer journey from New England to New
York in those days than it is now, and longer yet for a boy who had so
little money, but he let no obstacle keep him away.

He utilized his visit also to hear Beecher, the man who had taken so
powerful a hold of his childish fancy. Ever since those boyish days
when his mother read Beecher's sermons to him, and standing on the big
gray rock he had imagined himself another Beecher, he had longed to
hear this great man. It was only this childish desire holding fast to
him through the year that took him now, for church-going itself had no
attraction for him.

He sat on the steps of the gallery and heard this wonderful man preach
a sermon in which he illustrated an auctioneer selling a negro girl at
the block. He sat as one entranced. So did the immense audience, held
spellbound by the scene so graphically pictured. It was the first
interesting sermon he had ever heard. It made a tremendous impression
on him, not only in itself, but as a vivid contrast between the
formal, rattling-of-dry-bones sermon and the live, vital discourse
that takes hold of a man's mind and heart and compels him to go out
in the world and do things for the good of his fellow men. Long it
remained in his memory, but the greatest inspiration from it did not
come till later years, when suddenly it stood forth as if illumined,
to throw a brilliant radiance on a path he had decided to tread.

CHAPTER VIII.

WHILE THE CONFLICT RAGED

Lincoln's Call for 100,000 Men. Enlistment. Captain Conwell. In Camp
at Springfield, Mass. The Famous Gold-sheathed Sword.

In 1862, Lincoln sent out an earnest call for 100,000 men for the war.
Russell was not longer to be denied, and his father permitted him to
enlist. What silent agony, what earnest prayers for his safety went
up from his mother's heart, only other mothers in those terrible days
knew.

He raised a company from Worthington, Chesterfield, Huntington,
Russell, Blandford and the neighboring towns and was unanimously
elected captain, though only nineteen. His earnest, fiery speeches had
already made him famous, and when it was known he had enlisted and was
raising a company, there was a rush to get into it, and the men as
with one voice, demanded that he be their captain. No one ever thought
of canvassing against him. A com