societies and, before the war, a local military
company. While on garrison duty in the Civil War he organized what is
believed to have been the first free school for colored children in
the South. One day Minneapolis happened to be spoken of, and Conwell
happened to remember that he organized, when he was a lawyer in that
city, what became the first Y.M.C.A. branch there. Once he even started
a newspaper. And it was natural that the organizing instinct, as years
advanced, should lead him to greater and greater things, such as his
church, with the numerous associations formed within itself through his
influence, and the university--the organizing of the university being in
itself an achievement of positive romance.

"A life without interest!" Why, when I happened to ask, one day, how
many Presidents he had known since Lincoln, he replied, quite casually,
that he had "written the lives of most of them in their own homes"; and
by this he meant either personally or in collaboration with the American
biographer Abbott.

The many-sidedness of Conwell is one of the things that is always
fascinating. After you have quite got the feeling that he is peculiarly
a man of to-day, lecturing on to-day's possibilities to the people
of to-day, you happen upon some such fact as that he attracted the
attention of the London _Times_ through a lecture on Italian history at
Cambridge in England; or that on the evening of the day on which he was
admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of the United States he gave
a lecture in Washington on "The Curriculum of the Prophets in Ancient
Israel." The man's life is a succession of delightful surprises.

An odd trait of his character is his love for fire. He could easily have
been a veritable fire-worshiper instead of an orthodox Christian! He has
always loved a blaze, and he says reminiscently that for no single thing
was he punished so much when he was a child as for building bonfires.
And after securing possession, as he did in middle age, of the house
where he was born and of a great acreage around about, he had one of
the most enjoyable times of his life in tearing down old buildings that
needed to be destroyed and in heaping up fallen trees and rubbish and in
piling great heaps of wood and setting the great piles ablaze. You
see, there is one of the secrets of his strength--he has never lost the
capacity for fiery enthusiasm!

Always, too, in these later years he is showing his strength an