One expression in this extract will show a peculiarity which strongly recalls the artless, unconventional freshness of Western life in those days. The young pastor, though deeply and truly respected by all his elders and church members, was always addressed as "Henry," by them with a sort of family intimacy and familiarity. It was partly due to the simple, half woodland habits of the people, and partly to that quality in the pastor that made every elderly man love him as a son and every younger one as a brother. Henry's tastes, enthusiasms, and fancies, his darling garden, with its prize vegetables and choice roses, whence came bouquets for the æsthetic, and more solid presents of prize onions or squashes for the more literal--all these seemed to be part and parcel of the family stock of his church. His brother Charles, who from intellectual difficulties had abandoned the ministry, and devoted himself to a musical life as a profession, inhabited, with his wife and young family, a little cottage in the same grounds with his own, and shared his garden labors, and led the music of his church. "Henry and Charles" were as familiarly spoken of and known in Indianapolis circles as Castor and Pollux among the astronomers. In one of the revivals in Indianapolis, Charles, like his brother before him, found in an uplift of his moral faculties a tide to carry him over the sunken rocks of his logic. By his brother's advice, he took a Bible class, and began the story of the life of Christ, and the result was that after a while he saw his way clear to offer himself for ordination, and was settled in the ministry in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Thus that simple narrative had power to allay the speculative doubts of both brothers, and to give them an opening into the ministry. Mr. Beecher has always looked back with peculiar tenderness to that Western life, in the glow of his youthful days, and in that glorious, rich, abundant, unworn Western country. The West, with its wide, rich, exuberant spaces of land, its rolling prairies, garlanded with rainbows of ever-springing flowers, teeming with abundance of food for man, and opening in every direction avenues for youthful enterprise and hope, was to him a morning land. To carry Christ's spotless banner in high triumph through such a land, was a thing worth living for, and as he rode on horseback alone, from day to day, along the rolling prairie lands, sometimes up to his horse's head in grass and waving flowers, he felt himself kindled with a sort of ecstacy. The prairies rolled and blossomed in his sermons, and his style at this time had a tangled luxuriance of poetic imagery, a rush and abundance of words, a sort of rich and heavy involution, that resembled the growth of a tropical forest. "What sort of a style _am_ I forming?" he said to a critical friend, who had come to hear him preach. "Well, I should call it the 'tropical style,'" was the reply.