undertaken this labor of love,"
says he, "and gloried in enlightening them down East, that they might
keep their home-manufactured clergy at home, or give them some honorable
employ, better suited to their genius than that of reading old musty and
worm-eaten sermons."

Our preacher did visit New England in 1852, not as a missionary,
however, but as a delegate to the General Conference which met that year
in Boston. His fame had preceded him, and he was one of the marked men
of that body. Every one had heard some quaint story of his devotion to
his cause, his fearlessness, or his eccentricities, and crowds came out
to hear him preach. But our backwoods preacher was ill at ease. The
magnificence of the city, and the prim decorum of the Boston churches,
subdued him, and he could not preach with the fire and freedom of the
frontier log chapel. The crowds that came to hear him were disappointed,
and more than once they told him so.

"Is this Peter Cartwright, from Illinois, the old Western pioneer?" they
asked him once.

He answered them, "I am the very man."

"Well," said several of them, "brother, we are much disappointed; you
have fallen very much under our expectations, we expected to hear a much
greater sermon than that you preached to-day."

It was a regular Bostonian greeting, and it not only mortified and
disheartened the old pioneer, but it irritated him. "I tell you," says
he, "they roused me, and provoked what little religious patience I
had.... I left them abruptly, and in very gloomy mood retreated to my
lodgings, but took very little rest in sleep that night. I constantly
asked myself this question: Is it so, that I can not preach? or what is
the matter? I underwent a tremendous crucifixion in feeling."

The result was that he came to the conclusion that he _could_ preach,
and that the people of Boston had not "sense enough to know a good
sermon when they heard it." A little later old Father Taylor, that good
genius of the Boston Bethel, a man after Cartwright's own heart, came to
him and asked him to preach for him, and this, after hesitating, our
preacher agreed to do, upon the condition that he should be allowed to
conduct the services in regular Western style.

"In the meantime," says he, "I had learned from different sources that
the grand reason of my falling under the expectations of the
congregations I had addressed was substantially this: almost all those
curious incidents that had gained curre