this day, his influence is
perpetuated in the vast number of Father Mathew Benevolent Temperance
Societies.

[Illustration: DR CUYLER AT 32 (When Pastor of the Market St Church, New
York)]

Second only to Father Mathew in the number of converts which he has made
to total abstinence was that brilliant and dramatic platform orator,
John B. Gough. When he was a reckless young sot in Worcester,
Massachusetts, he had owed his conversion to a touch on his shoulder by
a shoemaker, named Joel Stratton, who had invited him to a Washingtonian
temperance meeting. Soon after that time he owed his conversion, under
God, to the influence of Miss Mary Whitcomb, the daughter of a Boylston
farmer in the neighborhood. He formed her acquaintance very soon after
he signed the temperance pledge in Worcester, and she consented to
assume the risk of becoming his wife. In the summer of 1856 I visited my
beloved friend Gough at his beautiful Boylston home to aid him in
revival services, which he was conducting in his own church, then
without a pastor. He was Sunday-school superintendent, pastor and leader
of inquiry meetings--all in himself. One evening he took me to the
house of his neighbor, Captain Flagg, and said to me: "Here, in this
house, Mary and I did our brief two or three weeks of courting. We
didn't talk of love, but only religion and about the welfare of my soul.
We prayed together every time we met; and it was such serious business
that I do not think I even kissed her until we were married. She took me
on trust, with three dollars in my pocket, and has been to me the best
wife God ever made." When they went to Boston, Dr. Edward N. Kirk
received Mr. Gough into the Mt. Vernon Street Church, just as many years
afterwards he received Mr. Moody to the same communion table.

Of Mr. Gough's extraordinary platform powers I need not speak while
there are so many now living that sat under the enchantment of his
eloquence. A man who could crowd an opera house in London to listen to
so unpopular a theme as temperance while a score or more of coroneted
carriages were waiting about the door must have been no ordinary master
of oratory. As an actor he might have been a second Garrick; as a
preacher of the Gospel he would have been a second Whitefield. My house
was his home when visiting our city for many years, and he used to tell
me that my letters to him were carried in his breast pocket until they
were worn to fragments. His last speech