The house was built; but before it was finished a series of misfortunes befell him, that threw him in debt nearly as badly as before. From snake-bites, disease, and accidents, he lost four or five horses, and several head of cattle, and the cholera killed nearly a thousand dollars' worth of his hogs. He went to work again, but somewhat discouraged, for he saw that his long-deferred hope of devoting his entire time to study and preaching, could never be realized. He was nearly sixty, and had broken his constitution by hard work, and could not much longer have endured the incessant riding and preaching of a traveling evangelist, even could he have been supported. The boys were then old enough to do much of the farm work, and from that time he preached more constantly, but spent more or less time at hard labor. For several years he was employed, for a small salary, at monthly preaching, by churches at Big Springs, Valley Falls, Round Prairie, and other points. In the fall of 1875 he concluded to visit once more the churches for which he had preached before coming to Kansas, and bid farewell to his old friends. He accordingly spent the following winter in a preaching tour throughout Iowa and Illinois. The State Meeting at Emporia, in 1877, in his absence, elected him President of the Society. Unable to find a State evangelist who would undertake the difficult task of reviving the old churches that had perished--which he thought was the work most needed at that time--he took the field himself. At the State meeting held at Yates Center the next year, he made the following report: "Time spent, five months; sermons preached, one hundred and fifty; churches organized, two; compensation received, $186.36." He also revived many scattered churches and Sunday-schools, and obtained regular preaching for some of them. He was greatly worried over the churches of this part of the State. They had been much weakened, and some of them nearly broken up by the tide of emigration that set into the southern and western counties. Attempts at co-operative State and district work were impeded by conservative papers, which prejudiced the brethren against missionary societies, and hireling pastors. He spent much time, both with tongue and pen, in answering these sophistries, and teaching the churches their duties. Many of the churches were really too poor to support regular preaching, and many that were able, thought themselves unable to do so. Yet someone must care for them, or they would perish. He resolved for the rest of his life to preach, without remuneration, where such preaching was most needed. And so the last eight or nine years of his life were spent in preaching on Saturdays and Sundays for weak churches, and the remainder of the time in working and writing. If a church was building a meeting house, and felt unable to support a preacher while doing so, he preached for it until it was built. If a