Another month’s work was done with great success, when he returned almost a new boy in his whole appearance. He had gained confidence by being constantly among people that did not know as much as he did.
I then had him commissioned for P---- county, a very mountainous region, and very destitute of the means of moral improvement. In a few months he had visited every family in the county. In many families the bare mention of his name will start tears in the eyes of the people, and the tracts that he distributed have been sewed together and covered with deerskin as remembrances of the man that left them.
Often through the day when he would come in sight of a cabin, he would alight from his horse and kneel in the woods and plead with God for success in his visit.
He next visited the counties of M---- and R----, two large counties, with remarkable success. By this time he became a fine-looking young man, and by his constant application to reading the books as he rode along, he had become an intelligent, spiritual Christian.
We then sent him to the large county of P----, where there was in portions of it a high degree of intelligence and refinement.
In a few months he was licensed to preach the gospel. He married a lady of high moral worth, and settled in the county of H---- over four weak churches. In two and a half years he received over two hundred persons into the church on profession of their faith; then took typhoid fever, with which he soon died in the triumphs of a living faith.
Since his death I have met with five young men, who are now ministers of the gospel, who had been led to Christ by his labors, all of whom speak of him as an extraordinary man in point of piety and usefulness.
Here was a boy that in all probability would have lived and died in ignorance and sin if he had not been found by a colporteur. He has often put his hand on my shoulder, and said with tears in his eyes, “Brother C----, if it had not been for the Tract Society, I should have been a poor grubber to-day, on the way to death and ruin.”
The great secret of his success was his untiring zeal and industry. He read and studied on his saddle; the shades of the forest were his closet in the summer, and the cleft of some mountain rock in the winter. His congregations were mostly ignorant families, and his rostrum a three-legged stool in the corner. All his talents were put to use in the Lord’s work, and no doubt he has his reward. Reader, go thou and do likewise, and receive a like gracious reward.