as kept up each
Lord's Day, and a Sunday School had been organized with the M. E.
South Christians and ourselves working together, by electing Prof. J.
W. Wilson as Superintendent.

In the summer of 1895 Evangelist O. L. Cook held a meeting of fifteen
or twenty days under an arbor on Main Street. At that meeting the
number of members was increased to seventy, and the church and Sunday
School were more fully organized, and have been meeting regularly on
the Lord's Day, and are at this time meeting in their own brick
veneered building, on Elizabeth Street. All these years I have had
the honor and responsibility of being the Senior Elder.

From the beginning to the present, 1911, there have been 448 added to
the church roll. At present the church owes nothing and is having
preaching all the time by Frank Richard, an able and conscientious
minister of the Gospel. The church, by removals, decrease almost as
fast as it increases. The membership at this writing is about 150.

Muscotah is a thriving little city just west of Effingham. There are
but few disciples there except those in the churches of the town. I
have preached there a few times. Once the funeral of a little girl,
name Clara Hastings, but she was no kin to us. At other times the
funerals of a very aged man and wife named Mooney. The wife was an
own niece of Alexander Campbell. She was a very good and learned
woman.

In 1899 with Clara who was in her 22nd year, I made a second trip
back to old Indiana. It had been eighteen years since the other
trip. The eighteen years had made many wonderful changes. So much
so that I felt almost like a stranger in a strange land. Had it not
been for the sweet, bright, joyful, spirit of the dear daughter that
accompanied me, the trip would have hardly been tolerable. O, the
joy of the father whose sons and daughters rise up in his old age and
bless and honor him! It was on this very visit when Captain
Hastings, hearing me talk of my boys and girls, said to me, "Cousin
Simpson, I see that you, like your dear old mother, love your
children. I never knew a mother that loved her children more than
she did." "True, Captain", I said, "I have always like the extremes
of age, the young and the old, and of course I like my own children.
I think when they were little about my knees was the happiest period
of my life."

We returned home to dear old Kansas--to our home near Effingham, but
it was not like it was at th