There was a young evangelist prominently engaged with us in our early work whose history is so sad, and whose relations, who are of the excellent of the earth, have already had their hearts so wounded because of him, that I have not been able to bring myself to write his name. He was of Irish descent, and before he became a preacher, or even a disciple, and while learning his trade, he had formed the drinking habit. He was not a young man of brilliant gifts, but they were solid. Moreover, he was humble, patient, industrious and persevering, and, having excellent health and a good physical organization, he gave promise of enduring usefulness. In short, he belonged to that class of young men that, while the people do not spoil them with flattery, yet the church set a great store by them. I can not write the history of his fall, for it was not made known even to his friends; only this, that the time came that he seemed hesitating whether he should continue a preacher, and finally he wholly abandoned the ministry. His wife, who was a most estimable and Christian lady, was paralyzed with grief. At length the shameful truth came out--he was a drunkard! A brother undertook to admonish him of the awful fate that awaited him in the future world, but this apostate and disgraced preacher turned fiercely around and said: "_don't talk to me of hell! I am in hell now_!" There was living in the neighborhood of the writer a Christian family--though not of the Disciples--who had a boy that they regarded as of great promise, and they did what they could to give him a good education. After he had been for a while a school teacher, he became a lawyer, resident in Atchison, and finally became a politician. He was talented, social, companionable and ambitious, and soon made himself a man of mark, and was petted and courted by the people, and was the idol of his father and mother. All this brought him much into company. But at that time the brewers and saloonkeepers exercised a despotism over the politicians and public men of the city as absolute as is the despotism of the Czar over the Russians. But there was this difference: instead of being slaves to a great monarch, these politicians were tools and lick-spittles to a set of coarse, brutal, low-bred liquor dealers, who were exceptionally ignorant, degraded and vile. These wretched and vicious corrupters of the public morals insisted on controlling every caucus, and that the candidates, of whatever party, should be men well pleasing in their sight. If not, then the fat was in the fire, and the candidate was forthwith slaughtered. The writer of these Recollections has been a Republican as long as there has been a Republican party, and has probably loved the party as well as it has deserved. This party, as is well known, has assumed to be "the party of moral and religious ideas." Now I have known, in cases not a few, men to be nominated for office by this