Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/151



WILL lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help." Ever the mountain streams pour fertility over the broad-stretching valleys; ever the hill people come down to people the plain. The best parts of our own great plains were peopled from the hills of New England in the middle of the last century and still to-day we go back to these hills for rest and fresh inspiration.

In the year 1843, in the same month that gave this country a Washington and a Lincoln, a child was born among the hilltops of western Massachusetts. The soil could barely support the little family to which it came, yet it gave rich gifts to the baby: the splendid physique of the mountain born, a voice as clear as the mountain brooks and as far reaching as the echo that springs from the circling hills that surrounded the home of his childhood. A Puritan ancestry with a more cavalierly strain from a paternal ancestor gave the faculty to dream dreams and see visions.

In the village of the birth-place of this child was a Methodist church, the only church of the village. The time of which I write was long before all the great preachers were corralled in the big cities, and while splendid brave men still drove over the hills on long circuits carrying the very best they had to give to the humblest hamlets. To this little hamlet of South Worthington came one of these preachers, making it for a time his home. He lived on the very next farm to our child of promise. This preacher seems to have had in his head, or more likely in his heart, the germ thought of our modern institutional church although he lived and died without ever having heard of such a thing. He knew the boy on the next farm. Most of the boy's other neighbors were not quite so sure he was a child of promise, or rather the things they predicted for his future were not always complimentary. He was continually doing something to surprise them out of