has been,
briefly stated:

Take care of your health.
Take care of your money.
Take care of your religion.

But, to return to Lindley, Missouri and to the 19th year of my age, I
find myself, Dr. Elmore, wife and boy, stopping with my brother Henry
and his young family. Brother Henry is nine yeas my senior. He
lives to this day. He had, a year or two before, moved to that
place.

The next morning after we arrived in Lindley, Dr. Elmore was fixing
the shaft of his buggy when his revolver fell from his pocket, was
discharged and shot him in the breast, the ball ranging upwards and
lodged in his shoulder. He soon got well, but the ball is with him
to this day.

I never owned a gun, a dog, a fiddle, a pocket knife, a razor, a
pipe, a cigar or cigarette, a plug of tobacco, or a hug of whiskey.
I never had any use for these things. I do not wholly condemn all
these, but I do think the world would be better and safer without
guns, dirk knives, dogs, tobacco, and strong drink.

During my stay of almost five years in Grundy and Sullivan counties,
Mo., I spent the time in teaching and attending school. The
principal events of my life were my second birth, my first sermon, my
first convert, my first funeral, my first marriage, (I mean the first
marriage I ever solemnized), my first religious debate and my first
vote.

I taught in both Sullivan and Grundy counties. I soon gained the
same popularity as a teacher that I had in Indiana. I never sought
schools. They always sought me. I attended the Baptist College in
Trenton one year. It was a very pleasant and profitable year of my
early life. It was before the war when the general talk was about
slavery and a probable war.

One day I and a young friend, chum and class-mate, a son of a Baptist
preacher, were studying our lessons under a large beech tree in the
college campus. My mate said to me, "Hastings, aren't you an
abolitionist?" I said, "Yes, I am." "I believe all men ought to be
free." He answered, "I thought so, and so am I and my father too."
"But I want to admonish you not to talk it so much." The admonition
was well given, and well taken, for the forebodings of the day were
that not talk but action would be the right step. And so it was, for
it was not long before the whole country was in an awful fratricidal
war. The like of which, I hope our country will never see again.

It was during this year the great migration took place