One of the most singular chapters in the life of Lorenzo Dow preceded his invasion of the far Southwest. When seized by a peculiar fancy that he was called to preach to the Roman Catholics of the world, and having learned that Ireland was one of their strongholds, he hied himself thither. To the quaint Irish, he was a wonder. His vociferous preaching and pungent zeal drew large crowds, but at times his path was not strewn with primroses, and the rougher element of the Irish throngs offered battle at times to his vaunting banters, but nothing was more to the liking of the indomitable Lorenzo. He stood ready to meet any rising emergency even when it was as grave as the attacks of the scraggy sons of the Emerald Isle. From Ireland he crossed over into Britain, and introduced the camp meeting method of worship, which meetings became popular in England, and later, in the United States. So far as is known Lorenzo Dow was the founder of the camp meeting with its flexibility and abandon of worship. His way in England was clearer than it had been in Ireland. To the staid Briton, he was an object of wonder, and his natural eloquence and eccentricities of speech and of dress, won for him boundless popularity, and the pressing throng heard him with avidity. He found peculiar delight in his assaults on the Jesuits, whom he denounced as conspirators against civil and religious freedom. Weird, stormy, and extensive as the career of Lorenzo Dow was, he was not an old man when he died, being only fifty-seven. He fought off constitutional weakness and heroically braced himself against the inroad of disease, with the same force with which he did all things else. For years he held the dark monster, death, at bay, and grimly declined to die that he might live and fight, to do which none was fonder than the redoubtable Dow. As may be easily inferred, Dow was a man of scant learning, so far as pertains to books, but he was a close and apt student of men and of affairs, and from his acquired fund, he preached with great effectiveness, unrestrained by conventionality, and unhindered by prim propriety. He told the truth as he saw it, not in tones of choice diction, but with a quaintness and pluck, and with such projectile force as to stir conviction and arouse action. He chose to be called a Methodist, yet he chafed under the imposed limitations of his church, and defiantly trampled down all restrictions, while he followed the bent of his own sweet will, controlled by none, not even his bosom companion, Peggy, if the indirect suggestions of her journal are to be relied on. He did not seek to found churches, but only desired to preach in his own wild manner. Sometimes he would make appointments a year in advance, at remote points, but would meet them promptly at the hour named.