s and logging-caps. There
were forty or fifty of them, and when we took up our collection they
responded with much liberality and cheerful shouts to one another.

"Put in fifty cents!" they yelled across the church. "Give her a
dollar!"

The collection was the largest that had been taken up in the history of
the settlement, but I soon learned that it was not the spiritual comfort
I offered which had appealed to the lumber-men. My driver of the
night before, who was one of their number, had told his pals of his
experience, and the whole camp had poured into town to see the woman
minister who carried a revolver.

"Her sermon?" said one of them to my landlord, after the meeting. "Huh!
I dunno what she preached. But, say, don't make no mistake about one
thing: the little preacher has sure got grit!"

IV. THE WOLF AT THE DOOR

When I returned to Albion College in the autumn of 1875 I brought with
me a problem which tormented me during my waking hours and chattered on
my pillow at night. Should I devote two more years of my vanishing
youth to the completion of my college course, or, instead, go at once
to Boston University, enter upon my theological studies, take my degree,
and be about my Father's business?

I was now twenty-seven years old, and I had been a licensed preacher for
three years. My reputation in the Northwest was growing, and by sermons
and lectures I could certainly earn enough to pay the expenses of the
full college course. On the other hand, Boston was a new world. There I
would be alone and practically penniless, and the opportunities for work
might be limited. Quite possibly in my final two years at Albion I could
even save enough money to make the experience in Boston less difficult,
and the clear common sense I had inherited from my mother reminded me
that in this course lay wisdom. Possibly it was some inheritance from my
visionary father which made me, at the end of three months, waive these
sage reflections, pack my few possessions, and start for Boston, where I
entered the theological school of the university in February, 1876.

It was an instance of stepping off a solid plank and into space; and
though there is exhilaration in the sensation, as I discovered then and
at later crises in life when I did the same thing, there was also an
amount of subsequent discomfort for which even my lively imagination
had not prepared me. I went through some grim months in Boston--months
during which I