her husband of it in the evening, Miranda Conwell said, half jokingly,
"our boy will some day be a great preacher." It was a fertile seed
dropped in a fertile mind, tilled assiduously for a brief space by
vivid childish imagination; but not ripened till sad experiences of
later years brought it to a glorious fruition.

Another result of the fireside readings might have been serious. A
short distance from the house a mountain stream leaps and foams over
the stones, seeming to choose, as Ruskin says, "the steepest places
to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering its handfuls of
crystal this way and that as the wind takes them." The walls of the
gorge rise sheer and steep; the path of the stream is strewn with huge
boulders, over which it foams snow white, pausing in quiet little
pools for breath before the next leap and scramble. Here and there at
the sides, stray tiny little waterfalls, very Thoreaus of streamlets,
content to wander off by themselves, away from the noisy rush of the
others, making little silvery rills of beauty in unobtrusive ways.
Over this gorge was a fallen log. Russell determined to enact the part
of Eliza in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," fleeing over the ice. It was a feat
to make a mother's heart stand still. Three separate times she
whipped him severely and forbade him to do it. He took the punishment
cheerfully, and went back to the log. He never gave up until he had
crossed it.

The vein of perseverance in his character was already setting into
firm, unyielding mould--the one trait to which Russell H. Conwell, the
preacher, the lecturer, writer, founder of college and hospital, may
attribute the success he has gained. This childish escapade was the
first to strike fire from its flint.