When he called on Mr. Whittaker in Nottingham, as already related, after some conversation had taken place, he remarked:—­

“I should like to hear thee again, Tom”.

“Well,” remarked Whittaker as a joke, “you can if you go with me to Derby.”

John accepted the invitation forthwith, much to his friend’s chagrin, who was bothered to know what to do with him; for he was under the impression that some members of the family where he expected to lodge would not give a very hearty welcome to this rough fellow.

This is Mr. Whittaker’s narrative of the sequel:—­

“We walked together to Derby that day.  At the meeting he spoke a little, and pleased the people.  When the meeting was over, he said:—­

“‘Can’t I sleep with you?’

“‘Well,’ I said, ’I have no objection; but, you know, I am only a lodger.’

“However, go with me he would, and did.  That was the man.  When John made up his mind to do a thing he did it; and to that feature in his character, no doubt, much of his future success may be attributed.  The gentleman at whose house he met me at Nottingham, and who was ashamed of him, subsequently became his servant, and touched his hat to him; and John has pulled up at my own door in his carriage, with a liveried servant, when I lived near to him in London.”

John Cassell was now in the thick of the fight.  In those days the opposition to the Gospel of Temperance was keen and bitter.  Sometimes there were great disturbances at the meetings, sometimes he was pelted with rubbish, at times he did not know where to turn for a night’s lodging.  It was, on the whole, a fierce conflict; but John was nothing daunted.

It is, of course, impossible to sum up the amount of a man’s influence.  John Cassell scattered the seed of temperance liberally.  Here is a case showing how one of the grains took root, and grew up to bear important fruit.

The Rev. Charles Garrett, the celebrated teetotal President of the Wesleyan Conference, writing several years after John Cassell’s death, says:—­

“I signed the pledge of total abstinence in 1840, after hearing a lecture on the subject by the late John Cassell.  I have therefore tried it for more than thirty years.  It has been a blessing to me, and has made me a blessing to others.”

How to cure the curse of drink, what to give in its place when the pleasures of the glass were taken away—­that was the problem which many have tried to solve.  None more successfully than John Cassell.

At a meeting in Exeter Hall he suddenly put a new view before his audience.  “I have it!” he exclaimed.

“The remedy is education.  Educate the working men and women, and you have a remedy for the crying evil of the country.  Give the people mental food, and they will not thirst after the abominable drink which is poisoning them.”

He had hitherto been doing something to assist the temperance cause by the sale of tea and coffee, and he now turned his attention to the issue of publications calculated to benefit the cause.