In 1860, when we were teaching school, my elder brother and myself, in Blanchford, Massachusetts, were asked to go to Brooklyn with the body of a lady who died near our schools.  We went to Brooklyn on Saturday and after the funeral, our friends asked us to stay over Sunday, saying that they would take us to hear Henry Ward Beecher!  That was a great inducement, because my father read the “Tribune” every Sunday morning after his Bible (and sometimes before it) and what Henry Ward Beecher said, my father thought, “was law and Gospel.”  Sunday night, we went to Plymouth Church, and there was a crowd an hour before the service, and when the doors were opened we were crowded up the stairs.  We boys were thrust back into a dirty corner where we could not see.  Oh, yes, that is the way they treat the boys, put them any place—­they’re only boys!  I remember the disappointment of that night, when we went there more to see than hear.  But finally Mr. Beecher came out and gave out his text.  I remember that I did not pay very much attention to it.  In the middle of the sermon Mr. Beecher began in the strangest way to auction off a woman:  “How much am I offered for the woman?” he yelled, and while in his biographies, they have said that this woman was sold in the Broadway Tabernacle, but I afterwards asked Mrs. Beecher and she said that Mr. Beecher had not sold this woman twice, so far as she knew, but that she recalled distinctly the sale in the Plymouth Church.  I remember standing up on tip-toes to look for that woman that was being sold.  After he had finished, after the singing of the hymn, he said “Brethren, be seated,” and then said, “Sam, come here.”  A colored boy came up tremblingly and stood beside him.  “This boy is offered for $770.00; he is owned in South Carolina and has run away.  His master offers him to me for $770.00, and now if the officers of the church will pass the plates the boy shall be set free,” and when the plates were returned over $1700.00 came in.  As we went our way home I said to my elder brother:  “Oh, what a grand thing it must be to preach to a congregation of fifteen hundred people.”  But my elder brother very wisely said:  “You don’t know anything about it; you do not know whether he is happy or not.”  “Well,” I suggested, “wasn’t it a strange thing to introduce a public auction in the middle of a sermon,” and my elder brother again said that if they did more of that in a country church they would have a larger congregation.  Afterwards I was quite fortunate to know Mr. Beecher and frequently reported his sermons.  I often heard him say that the happiest years he ever knew were back in Lawrenceville, Ohio, in that little church where there were no lamps and he had to borrow them himself, light them himself, and prepare the church for the first service.  He told how he swept the church, lighted the fire in the stove, and how it smoked; then how he sawed the wood to heat the church, and how he went into carpenter work to earn money to pay his own salary, yet he said that was the happiest time of his life.  Mrs. Beecher told me afterwards that Mr. Beecher often talked about those days and said that bye and bye he would retire and they would again go back to the simple life they had enjoyed so much.