Mrs. Beecher helped support the family by taking in sewing and keeping boarders. Mr. Beecher soon became the idol of his people. Mr. John R. Howard, in his life of Beecher, repeats these words of the famous preacher: "There lived over on the other side of the street in Lawrenceburg, a very profane man who was counted ugly. I understood that he had said some very bitter things of me. I went right over to his store, and sat down on the counter to talk with him. I happened in often--day in and day out. My errand was to make him like me. I did make him like me,--and all the children too; and when I left, two or three years later, it was his house that was opened to me and all my family for the week after I gave up my room. And to the day of his death, I do not believe the old man could mention my name without crying." "Once," says a brother minister, "he called to a poor German emigrant woman that if she would bring him her clothes-line, he would show her how to get her winter's supply of fuel. She brought it, and he tied a stone to one end, and flinging it out from the shore over the logs, would draw them in. In a little while their combined efforts had brought in a dray-load." Mr. Beecher began his work modestly: "I never expected that I could accomplish much," he said. "I merely went to work with the feeling: 'I will do as well as I can, and I will stick to it, if the Lord pleases, and fight his battle the best way I know how.' And I was thankful as I could be. Nobody ever sent me a spare-rib that I did not thank God for the kindness which was shown me. I recollect when Judge ---- gave me his cast-off clothing, I felt that I was sumptuously clothed. I wore old coats and second-hand shirts for two or three years, and I was not above it, either, although sometimes, as I was physically a somewhat well-developed man, and the judge was thin and his legs were slim, they were rather a tight fit." "At first," he says, "I preached some theology.... But my horizon grew larger and larger in that one idea of Christ.... After I had gone through two or three revivals of religion, when I looked around, he was all in all. And my whole ministry sprang out of that." After two years at Lawrenceburg, Mr. Beecher was called to the Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, then a place of four thousand inhabitants, with a salary of six hundred dollars. He declined the call twice, but finally, laying the matter before the Synod, was constrained to accept.