The Conwell house was a station on the Underground Railway, and Russell Conwell remembers, when a lad, seeing the escaping slaves that his father had driven across country and temporarily hidden. ``Those were heroic days,'' he says, quietly. ``And once in a while my father let me go with him. They were wonderful night drives--the cowering slaves, the darkness of the road, the caution and the silence and dread of it all.''
This underground route, he remembers, was from Philadelphia to New Haven, thence to Springfield, where Conwell's father would take his charge, and onward to Bellows Falls and Canada.
Conwell tells, too, of meeting Frederick Douglass, the colored orator, in that little cottage in the hills. `` `I never saw my father,' Douglass said one day--his father was a white man--`and Iremember little of my mother except that once she tried to keep an overseer from whipping me, and the lash cut across her own face, and her blood fell over me.'
``When John Brown was captured,'' Conwell went on, ``my father tried to sell this place to get a little money to send to help his defense.
But he couldn't sell it, and on the day of the execu-tion we knelt solemnly here, from eleven to twelve, just praying, praying in silence for the passing soul of John Brown. And as we prayed we knew that others were also praying, for a church-bell tolled during that entire hour, and its awesome boom went sadly sounding over these hills.''
Conwell believes that his real life dates from a happening of the time of the Civil War--a happening that still looms vivid and intense before him, and which undoubtedly did deepen and strengthen his strong and deep nature. Yet the real Conwell was always essentially the same.
Neighborhood tradition still tells of his bravery as a boy and a youth, of his reckless coasting, his skill as a swimmer and his saving of lives, his strength and endurance, his plunging out into the darkness of a wild winter night to save a neighbor's cattle. His soldiers came home with tales of his devotion to them, and of how he shared his rations and his blankets and bravely risked his life; of how he crept off into a swamp, at imminent peril, to rescue one of his men lost or mired there. The present Conwell was always Conwell;in fact, he may be traced through his ancestry, too, for in him are the sturdy virtues, the bravery, the grim determination, the practicality, of his father;and romanticism, that comes from his grandmother;and the dreamy qualities of his mother, who, practical and hardworking New England woman that she was, was at the same time influenced by an almost startling mysticism.
And Conwell himself is a dreamer: first of all he is a dreamer; it is the most important fact in regard to him! It is because he is a dreamer and visualizes his dreams that he can plan the great things that to other men would seem impossibilities; and then his intensely practical side his intense efficiency, his power, his skill, his patience, his fine earnestness, his mastery over others, develop his dreams into realities.
He dreams dreams and sees visions--but his visions are never visionary and his dreams become facts.
The rocky hills which meant a dogged struggle for very existence, the fugitive slaves, John Brown --what a school for youth! And the literal school was a tiny one-room school-house where young Conwell came under the care of a teacher who realized the boy's unusual capabilities and was able to give him broad and unusual help. Then a wise country preacher also recognized the unusual, and urged the parents to give still more education, whereupon supreme effort was made and young Russell was sent to Wilbraham Academy.
He likes to tell of his life there, and of the hardships, of which he makes light; and of the joy with which week-end pies and cakes were received from home!
He tells of how he went out on the roads selling books from house to house, and of how eagerly he devoured the contents of the sample books that he carried. ``They were a foundation of learning for me,'' he says, soberly. ``And they gave me a broad idea of the world.''
He went to Yale in 1860, but the outbreak of the war interfered with college, and he enlisted in 1861. But he was only eighteen, and his father objected, and he went back to Yale. But next year he again enlisted, and men of his Berkshire neighborhood, likewise enlisting, insisted that he be their captain; and Governor Andrews, appealed to, consented to commission the nineteen-year-old youth who was so evidently a natural leader;and the men gave freely of their scant money to get for him a sword, all gay and splendid with gilt, and upon the sword was the declaration in stately Latin that, ``True friendship is eternal.''
And with that sword is associated the most vivid, the most momentous experience of Russell Conwell's life.
That sword hangs at the head of Conwell's bed in his home in Philadelphia. Man of peace that he is, and minister of peace, that symbol of war has for over half a century been of infinite importance to him.
He told me the story as we stood together before that sword. And as he told the story, speaking with quiet repression, but seeing it all and living it all just as vividly as if it had occurred but yesterday, ``That sword has meant so much to me,''
he murmured; and then he began the tale:
