``Why does grandmother cry so often?''
he remembers asking when he was a little boy.
And he was told that it was for the husband of
her youth.
We went back into the little house, and he
showed me the room in which he first saw John
Brown. ``I came down early one morning, and
saw a huge, hairy man sprawled upon the bed
there--and I was frightened,'' he says.
But John Brown did not long frighten him!
For he was much at their house after that, and was
so friendly with Russell and his brother that there
was no chance for awe; and it gives a curious side-
light on the character of the stern abolitionist
that he actually, with infinite patience, taught the
old horse of the Conwells to go home alone with
the wagon after leaving the boys at school, a mile
or more away, and at school-closing time to trot
gently off for them without a driver when merely
faced in that direction and told to go! Conwell
remembers how John Brown, in training it, used
patiently to walk beside the horse, and control
its going and its turnings, until it was quite ready
to go and turn entirely by itself.
The Conwell house was a station on the
Underground Railway, and Russell Conwell remembers,
when a lad, seeing the escaping slaves that
his father had driven across country and temporarily
hidden.
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