For a short time near the close of his theological course he edited a paper, and appears to have done his work with marked success; but circumstances brought it to a speedy close. “The _Cincinnati Journal_ needed an editor. There was at that time in the middle class of Lane Seminary a green young man of some facility of pen. He had written a series of anonymous articles on the Catholic question in the evening paper edited by Mr. Thomas. He was considered rather tonguey, and not likely to back down from anything from want of hopefulness and self-confidence. Him Dr. Brainerd called to the chair, and, on relinquishing the editorship, recommended this beardless youth to the proprietors of the journal as his successor. One fine morning this young man found himself an editor upon a salary! An editor must have a coat; and Platt Evans made a lion-skin overcoat that has never had a successor or an equal. He must have a watch! A plain, white-faced watch soon ticked in his pocket. Alas! evil days befell the publishers. The paper had a new owner. He did not want the young editor; the young editor _did_ want the watch, but could not pay for it; the seller took it back, to the great grief of the young theologian, who went back disconsolate to his classes at Lane Seminary, and was broken-hearted for a whole day. The young man recovered, and has been in mischief ever since, some folks think.” When the pro-slavery riots broke out in Cincinnati in 1836, and James G. Birney’s printing-office and press were destroyed by a mob headed by Kentucky slaveholders, young Beecher volunteered and was sworn in as special constable, and for several nights patrolled the streets thoroughly armed to protect the negroes and their friends. He was earnest in this matter, as in everything else that he undertook. His sister Harriet, finding him busy running bullets, and asking him what he was doing it for, was a good deal startled to hear him answer in a hard, determined voice: “To kill men.” Besides the influence of this common, every-day life, which was afterwards reflected in his own hospitable spirit and home, two domestic events took place during these three years that deserve more especial notice. The first was “the Family Meeting.”