In the morning I listened to a sermon from a genuine backwoodsman, the young man I have spoken of in the chapter entitled "The Old, Old Book and its Story in the Wilds of the Southwest," as the guide who piloted the venerable Bible-distributor through that rough, wild region. He had since been licensed, first as an exhorter, and then as a local preacher. It would hardly be possible to find a young preacher whose education had been more completely that of the Brush. His home was in the wild region I have described in that chapter, and his companions had been as illiterate and uncultivated as could well be found. He had attended school but a very few months, and that was vastly poorer than the most of my readers have ever conceived of as possible. He had then taught, for a few months, this school in his own neighborhood, in which he had received his only education. His reading was tolerable, his writing passable, his spelling horrible. Several weeks afterward I received a letter from him, in which he expressed the hope that certain facts I had asked him to send me would have due weight--which he spelled "dew wate." He was about twenty years old, full six feet in height, with very full, broad chest, square shoulders, and he stood as erect and straight as any Indian. He had a full head of very handsome black hair, bright black eyes, a very mild, pleasant expression of countenance, and a voice that rang loud, smooth, and clear like a trumpet. I listened to his sermon with unbounded amazement, and, I may add, delight. It was a mystery to me how one so unlettered and so unlearned in all religious reading except the Bible--and, in the nature of the case, but poorly versed in that--could have acquired thoughts so sensible and good. It was a greater mystery how he could clothe them in such appropriate language. Both his thoughts and his words flowed as freely as the stream near by, and they had great power to arrest the attention and move the hearts of his hearers. It was the power of undoubted sincerity and burning zeal; it was the power of one with superior natural endowments stirred to their profoundest depths, and, beyond all question, taught of God. It was the power of one whose life, whose education, and whose modes of thought were in full sympathy with his hearers, who had been born in the same wild region and reared with the same educational surroundings as himself. He was adapted to preach to those people, as the learned pastors of intelligent congregations are adapted to theirs; and each, with his human sympathies, was better adapted to preach to those of like human character and infirmities than any angel in heaven. If it be heresy, I am so heretical as to believe that God has other methods of training some men--yea, many men--to be useful ministers of the Gospel than by filling their heads with Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. So he had trained this man for the remarkable work he had for him to do. Several weeks after this I met him at conference,