ermined to become a
minister. I had a good law practice, but I determined to give it up. For
many years I had felt more or less of a call to the ministry, and here
at length was the definite time to begin.

"Week by week I preached there"--how strange, now, to think of William
Dean Howells and the colonel-preacher!--"and after a while the church
was completed, and in that very church, there in Lexington, I was
ordained a minister."

A marvelous thing, all this, even without considering the marvelous
heights that Conwell has since attained--a marvelous thing, an
achievement of positive romance! That little church stood for American
bravery and initiative and self-sacrifice and romanticism in a way that
well befitted good old Lexington.

To leave a large and overflowing law practice and take up the ministry
at a salary of six hundred dollars a year seemed to the relatives of
Conwell's wife the extreme of foolishness, and they did not hesitate
so to express themselves. Naturally enough, they did not have Conwell's
vision. Yet he himself was fair enough to realize and to admit that
there was a good deal of fairness in their objections; and so he said to
the congregation that, although he was quite ready to come for the six
hundred dollars a year, he expected them to double his salary as soon as
he doubled the church membership. This seemed to them a good deal like a
joke, but they answered in perfect earnestness that they would be quite
willing to do the doubling as soon as he did the doubling, and in less
than a year the salary was doubled accordingly.

I asked him if he had found it hard to give up the lucrative law for
a poor ministry, and his reply gave a delightful impression of his
capacity for humorous insight into human nature, for he said, with a
genial twinkle:

"Oh yes, it was a wrench; but there is a sort of romance of
self-sacrifice, you know. I rather suppose the old-time martyrs rather
enjoyed themselves in being martyrs!"

Conwell did not stay very long in Lexington. A struggling little church
in Philadelphia heard of what he was doing, and so an old deacon went up
to see and hear him, and an invitation was given; and as the Lexington
church seemed to be prosperously on its feet, and the needs of the
Philadelphia body keenly appealed to Conwell's imagination, a change was
made, and at a salary of eight hundred dollars a year he went, in
1882, to the little struggling Philadelphia congregation, and of