He has ever that sense of defeat from which all great minds suffer whose high ideals ever elude them.

In manner and speech, he is simple and unaffected, and approachable at all times.  When not away from the city lecturing, he spends a certain part of the day in his study at the church, where any one can see him on any matter which he may wish to bring to his attention.  The ante-room is thronged at the hour when it is known that he will be there.  People waylay him in the church corridors, and on the streets, so well known is his kindly heart, his attentive ear, his generous hand.

Not only do these visitors invade the church, but they come to his home.  Early in the morning they are there.  They await him when he returns late at night.  As an instance of their number, one Saturday afternoon late in June he had one hour free which he hoped to take for rest and the preparation of the next morning’s sermon.  During that one hour he had six callers, each staying until the next arrived.  One of these was a young man whom Dr. Conwell had never seen, a boy no more than seventeen or eighteen.  He had a few weeks before made a runaway marriage with a girl still younger than himself.  Her parents had indignantly taken the bride home, and the young husband came to Dr. Conwell to ask him to seek out these parents and persuade them to let the child wife return to her husband.

He has a knack of putting everybody at ease in his presence, which perhaps accounts for the freedom with which people, even utter strangers, come to him and pour into his ear their life secrets.  This earnest desire to help people, to make them happier and better, shines from his life with such force that one feels it immediately on entering his presence and opens one’s heart to him.  He helps, advises, and, because he is so preeminently a man of faith and believes so firmly that all he has done has been accomplished by faith and perseverance, he inspires others with like confidence in themselves.  They go away encouraged, hopeful, strengthened for the work that lies ahead of them, or for the trouble they must surmount It is little wonder the people throng to him for help.

His simple, informal view of life is shown in other things.  During a summer vacation in the Berkshires he was scheduled to lecture in one of the home towns.  His old friends and neighbors dearly love to hear him, and nearly always secure a lecture from him while he is supposed to be resting.  Entirely forgetting the lecture, he planned a fishing trip that day.  Just as the fishing party was ready to start, some one remembered the lecture.  There would not be time to go fishing, return, dress and go to the lecture town.  But Dr. Conwell is a great fisherman, and he disliked most thoroughly to give up that fishing trip.  He thought about it a few minutes, and then in his informal, unconventional fashion, decided he would both fish and lecture.  He packed his lecturing