“After many rests I made it to the top of the hill and entered the little unpainted church where I sat through the service. Then at the end I heard those people sing! Most of them were in Eureka Springs to keep from leaving this ‘vale of tears.’ They not only sang, they shouted the words: “My heavenly home is bright and fair, I feel like traveling on! No pain nor death can enter there, I feel like traveling on....” “If ever I have gotten religion in my entire life, it was in that very hour in the little church on the hilltop, and I was only six years old. You say a kid of that age can’t ‘get religion.’ That’s what you think. I knew the facts of life and death far better than most children of my age. My ears were sharp and I had overheard my mother and father discuss my probable death in broken tones of grief and despair. They already had six precious children sleeping in early graves scattered through the Ozark hills where they had lived. And I would be the next to go. This talk did not frighten me. I didn’t care. “But when I heard the people in that little church sing that great song of inspiration I knew that I wasn’t going to die so soon and, child that I was, my courage was amazing and before the song was ended I was voicing that one line— “I feel like traveling on....” And I meant it, too! That’s how I “got religion” at the age of six and it is with me yet at three score and ten plus. I still “feel like traveling on...!” “Coming down the hill wasn’t hard at all. I slid most of the way. And when I entered the cabin my mother’s face was happier than I had ever seen it before in all my life. “In no time at all, I was climbing all over the hills, ever eager to see what might be in the hollow just beyond. I picked huckleberries and blackberries, caught minnows in the creeks and lived the life of the average boy in the hills. If I had been taken to Eureka Springs on soft cushions and whizzed over paved highways in an automobile, I wonder if it would have been the same. “The thing that happened to me happened to thousands both young and old during the two or three decades while Eureka Springs was at its height as a health resort. When such folks arrived in Eureka Springs over the crooked railway their ‘cure’ began immediately. The bumpty-bump-bump and the ceaseless sway of the old horse-drawn vehicles that met them at the depot started their livers into unprecedented activity even before they arrived to register at the Perry House or the Southern Hotel.