o come upon one of these lonely cabins and enjoy the
privilege of a night's lodging. If the family were Methodists, there was
sure to be preaching that night; and if they were strangers to that
church, our preacher set to work at once to convert them. He labored
faithfully, faring hard, and braving dangers from which his city
brethren would have shrunk appalled. He carried the Gospel and the
Methodist Episcopal Church into all parts of the great State of
Illinois, and even into Iowa and the Indian country.

In 1832, the first Illinois Conference met in the town of Jacksonville,
and Mr. Cartwright attended it. He had now been a traveling preacher for
twenty-eight years, and, as he felt himself sorely in need of rest, he
asked and obtained a superannuated relation for one year. On the same
day, Bishop Soule, who presided at the Conference, came to him to ask
his advice with reference to the Quincy District. It was very important,
but the bishop could not find a presiding elder willing to take charge
of it, as it was an almost unbroken wilderness. The bishop was in sore
distress, as he feared that he would be obliged to merge it into another
district. The spirit of the backwoods preacher at once took fire, and,
declaring that so important a field ought not to be neglected, he
expressed his willingness to relinquish his superannuated relation and
accept the charge. The bishop took him at his word and appointed him to
the district, which he served faithfully. His adventures in traveling
from place to place to fill his appointments are intensely interesting,
and I would gladly reproduce them here did the limits of this chapter
permit.

It required no small amount of courage to perform the various duties of
a backwoods preacher, and in this quality our preacher was not
deficient. He was frequently called upon to exercise it in his camp
meetings. These assemblies never failed to gather large crowds from all
parts of the surrounding country, and among others came numerous
rowdies, whose delight it was to annoy the preachers and worshipers in
every conceivable way. Cartwright put up with the annoyance as long as
he could, and then determined to put a stop to it. He believed in
fighting the devil with fire, and put down many a disturbance. The
following is the way he went about it:

"Our last quarterly meeting was a camp meeting. We had a great many
tents and a large turnout for a new country, and, perhaps, there never
was a gr