During the holidays of the year I was in school in Indianapolis I held a good meeting at Christian Liberty where I had taught and preached for a number of years. Many hearing, believed and were baptized. It was at this place afterwards that I preached my farewell sermon to old Indianans before going to Kansas. There were a great many people at this meeting. Among them a Methodist preacher who, being free to address the people, complimented me by saying that I had not only been a faithful servant of God among my own people but also among all people. He also said that while I left many friends in Indiana I would make many in Kansas. I am happy to say, I have found it even so. That preacher after ran for Governor of Indiana. I was doing so well and had so many friends in Indiana that I had about abandoned the idea of going to Kansas, but mother, two of my brothers and my two sisters, were already in Kansas and were pleading with me to visit them at any rate. So about the first of July, 1867 I took a train from Washington, Indiana, to St. Louis, Mo, and from there I boarded a steamer for Leavenworth, Kansas, where I landed on the tenth of July, 1867. Our steamer, however, had made a landing early in the morning at Wyandotte to unload some railroad irons for the second road in Kansas. While there I steeped off on the muddy shore remarking that that was the first time I had ever dotted Kansas soil with my feet. "Well sir" said an old darky standing by, "this as a mighty big dot where you step off." I do not know to this day whether he meant the track I made or the town. Kansas City, Missouri was not big enough to stop at then, but it is the big dot of the West now. At Leavenworth and everywhere the yards, gardens, road-sides, fields, all looked barren and dead as if a fire had ran over them. The grass-hoppers had just left. My brother Henry lived west of Leavenworth city in what was called the Nine Mile House. My brother, younger brother, Rufus, and two sisters, Mrs. Dotson, and Mrs. Sears, lived near Grasshopper Falls known now as Valley Falls. Of course I had not been in Kansas very long until it was known that I was a young preacher. And I was called upon to preach the funeral of a most excellent lady, Mrs. Roach, who had died in the neighborhood of the Nine Mile House. This was the first time I ever preached in Kansas. It was only a few days after this that I attended a meeting held by Brethren Dibble and McCleary, a few miles west of the Nine Mile House at a place called NO. 6 and here I was invited to preach. I did do it, taking for a subject, "Growth." I remember saying in order to growth there must be union, for separation is death. Even rocks grow, but, separated into stones, they ceased to grow. Good, old, devout, scholarly brother Humber was there, and kindly criticized my sermon by saying he did not believe that rocks grow. I have never preached that sermon since, but I still think rocks do grow.