jokes, its
student pranks and grind, is routine drudgery and cob-webbery prose.
Bookish professors and conventional students rarely have just such an
animate problem of French artistry and Bohemian experience to solve.
They did nobly, to be sure, but here was a mind which threw over them
all the glamour of romance."

Mr. Wright entered the Preparatory Department of Hiram College at the
age of twenty, having previously accepted the faith and identified
himself with the Christian Church in the little quarry town of Grafton,
Ohio. He continued active in the different departments of work in his
church all during his school years with the ultimate result of his
entering the ministry.

Having no financial means, while in school he made his way by doing odd
jobs about town, house painting and decorating, sketching, etc. After
two years of school life, while laboring to gain funds in order that he
might continue his schooling, he contracted from overwork and out-door
exposure a severe case of pneumonia that left his eyesight badly
impaired and his constitution in such condition that, to the present
day, he has never fully recovered.

Air castles were tumbled and hopes blasted when his physician advised
him that it would be fatal to re-enter school for, at least, another
year. Whereupon, seeking health and a means of existence, starting from
a point on the Mahoning river, he canoed with sketch and note book, but
alone, down stream a distance of more than five hundred miles. From
this point, by train, he embarked for the Ozark mountains in southwest
Missouri. Here, for some months, while gradually regaining his strength,
he secured employment at farm work, sketching and painting at intervals.

Once more, he found himself on bed-rock, taking his last cent to pay
express charges back to Ohio on some finished pictures, but, this time,
fortune smiled promptly with a good check by return mail.

It was while in the Ozarks that Harold Bell Wright preached his first
sermon. Being a regular attendant at the services, held in the little
mountain log school house, he was asked to talk to the people, one
Sunday, when the regular preacher had failed to appear.

From this Sunday morning talk, that could hardly be called a sermon, and
others that followed, he came to feel that he could do more good in the
ministry than he could in any other field of labor, and soon thereafter
accepted a regular pastorate at Pierce City, Missouri, at a ye