Beecher was a great student of the Bible, reading it on the cars as he travelled to his lecture appointments, and, like Emerson, jotting down in little note-books thoughts and suggestions. He prepared his Sunday morning sermon in an hour and a half, between breakfast and the time of service. Locked into his room, he wrote with his goose-quill pen the headings and a few illustrations. Then in the pulpit the eloquent words came pouring from his lips, born of the time and place. His evening sermon he prepared after tea. When asked how he was able to do so much work, he said it was partly owing to a good constitution; "much, also, to an early acquired knowledge of how to take care of myself, to secure invariably a full measure of sleep, to regard food as an engineer does fuel (to be employed economically, and entirely with reference to the work to be done by the machine); much to the habit of economizing social forces, and not wasting in needless conversation and pleasurable hilarities the spirit that would carry me through many days of necessary work; but, above all, to the possession of a hopeful disposition and natural courage, to sympathy with men, and to an unfailing trust in God; so that I have always worked for the love of working." He never used stimulants except as a medicine. He wrote to a friend, "I am a _total abstainer, both in belief and practice_.... I hold that no man in health _needs_ or is the better for alcoholic stimulants; that great good will follow to the whole community from the total disuse of them as articles of diet or luxury; and that so soon as the moral sense of society will sustain such laws, it will be wise and right to enact prohibitory liquor laws.... I should as soon think of offering a well man a dose of rhubarb as a dose of brandy." Mr. Beecher was an earnest advocate of woman suffrage as well as temperance. He believed in equality of privilege in the pulpit, in medicine, everywhere, though he said, "People may talk about equality of the sexes!... The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men." Of woman, he said, "She is the right hand of the charities of the church.... She is not only permitted in the great orthodox churches of New England to speak in meeting, but when they send her abroad, ordained to preach the gospel to the heathen, there she is permitted to preach; and when they come home, women may still teach in a hall, but not in a church, and dear old men there are yet so conservative that they are reading through golden spectacles their Bibles, and saying: 'I suffer not a woman to preach.'" Mr. Beecher found his recreation from hard work in his love of country life. His farm at Lenox, Mass., proving too far from Brooklyn, he bought, in 1859, thirty-six acres at Peekskill-on-the-Hudson, and named it Boscobel. The old farmhouse was said to have been the headquarters of General Israel Putnam of Revolutionary fame.