He got them from the brakeman, the mechanic, the
blacksmith, the day laborer, the newsboy, the train conductor, the
clerk, the lawyer, the physician, and the business man.

He did not watch the progress of the great human battle from his study,
as many did. He went into the thick of the fight himself. He was in
the smoke and din. Where the battle of life raged fiercest, there he
was studying its great problems. Now it was the problem of slavery;
again the problem of government, or commerce, or education,--whatever
touched the lives of men. He kept his hand upon the pulse of events.
He was in the swim of things. The great, busy, ambitious world was
everywhere throbbing for him.

[Illustration: Henry Ward Beecher]

When he once got a taste of the power and helpfulness which comes from
the study of real life, when he saw how much more forceful and
interesting actual life stories were as they were being lived than
anything he could get out of any book except the Bible, he was never
again satisfied without illustrations fresh from the lives of the
people he met every day.

Beecher believed a sermon a failure when it does not make a great mass
of hearers go away with a new determination to make a little more of
themselves, to do their work a little better, to be a little more
conscientious, a little more helpful, a little more determined to do
their share in the world.

This great observer was not only a student of human nature, but of all
nature as well. I watched him, many a time, completely absorbed in
drinking in the beauties of the marvelous landscape, gathering grandeur
and sublimity from the great White Mountains, which he loved so well,
and where he spent many summers.

He always preached on Sunday at the hotel where he stayed, and great
crowds came from every direction to hear him. There was something in
his sermons that appealed to the best in everyone who heard him. They
were full of pictures of beautiful landscapes, seascapes, and
entrancing sunsets. The clouds, the rain, the sunshine, and the storm
were reflected in them. The flowers, the fields, the brooks, the
record of creation imprinted in the rocks and the mountains were
intermingled with the ferryboats, the steam-cars, orphans, calamities,
accidents, all sorts of experiences and bits of life. Happiness and
sunshine, birds and trees alternated with the direst poverty in the
slums, people on sick beds and death beds, in hospitals and in f