Second only to Father Mathew in the number of converts which he has made to total abstinence was that brilliant and dramatic platform orator, John B. Gough. When he was a reckless young sot in Worcester, Massachusetts, he had owed his conversion to a touch on his shoulder by a shoemaker, named Joel Stratton, who had invited him to a Washingtonian temperance meeting. Soon after that time he owed his conversion, under God, to the influence of Miss Mary Whitcomb, the daughter of a Boylston farmer in the neighborhood. He formed her acquaintance very soon after he signed the temperance pledge in Worcester, and she consented to assume the risk of becoming his wife. In the summer of 1856 I visited my beloved friend Gough at his beautiful Boylston home to aid him in revival services, which he was conducting in his own church, then without a pastor. He was Sunday-school superintendent, pastor and leader of inquiry meetings--all in himself. One evening he took me to the house of his neighbor, Captain Flagg, and said to me: "Here, in this house, Mary and I did our brief two or three weeks of courting. We didn't talk of love, but only religion and about the welfare of my soul. We prayed together every time we met; and it was such serious business that I do not think I even kissed her until we were married. She took me on trust, with three dollars in my pocket, and has been to me the best wife God ever made." When they went to Boston, Dr. Edward N. Kirk received Mr. Gough into the Mt. Vernon Street Church, just as many years afterwards he received Mr. Moody to the same communion table. Of Mr. Gough's extraordinary platform powers I need not speak while there are so many now living that sat under the enchantment of his eloquence. A man who could crowd an opera house in London to listen to so unpopular a theme as temperance while a score or more of coroneted carriages were waiting about the door must have been no ordinary master of oratory. As an actor he might have been a second Garrick; as a preacher of the Gospel he would have been a second Whitefield. My house was his home when visiting our city for many years, and he used to tell me that my letters to him were carried in his breast pocket until they were worn to fragments. His last speech, delivered in Philadelphia, displayed much of his early power, and the last sentence, "Young man, keep a clean record," rung out as he fell stricken with apoplexy, and the eloquent voice was silent forever. God's messenger met him where every true warrior may well desire to be met--in the heat of the battle, and with the harness on.