It was a solemn hour, an hour in which worldly ambitions faded before the sublime spectacle of a man freely, calmly giving his very life because he had dared to live out his honest belief that all men should be free.  Like a kaleidoscope, Brown’s history passed through Russell’s mind as he sat there.  He saw the brutal whipping of the little slave boy which had so aroused Brown’s anger when, a small boy himself, he led cattle through the western forests.  Russell’s hands clenched as he pictured it and he felt willing to fight as Brown had done, single-handed and alone if need be, to right so horrible a wrong.  He could see how the idea had grown with John Brown’s growth and strengthened with his strength until he came to manhood with a single purpose dominating his life, and a will to do it that could neither be broken nor bent.  He pictured him in Kansas when son after son was laid on the altar of liberty as unflinchingly as Abraham held the knife at his own son’s breast at God’s behest.  Then the first “blow at Harper’s Ferry in the cause of liberty for all men—­the capture of the town of three thousand by twenty-two men, and now this—­the public execution—­the fearless spirit that looked only to God for guidance, that feared neither man nor man’s laws, stopped on the very threshold of the supreme effort for which he had planned his life.  Stopped?  It was the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment of Infantry that was the first to sing on its way South, that song, afterward sung by the armies of a nation to the steady tramp of feet,

  “John Brown’s body lies mouldering in the grave,
        But his soul goes marching on.”

CHAPTER VII

WAR’S ALARMS

College Days at Yale.  The Outbreak of the Civil War.  Patriotic Speechmaking.  New York and Henry Ward Beecher.

School days at Wilbraham ended, Russell determined to climb higher.  As yet, he scarcely knew the purpose of his studying.  Ambitions seethed in him to know, to be able to do.  He only realized that he must have the tools ready when the work came.  Not daunted, therefore, by the bitter experiences at Wilbraham, Russell determined to go to Yale.  This meant a stern fight indeed, one that would call out all his reserves of determination, perseverance and indifference to the jeers and jibes of unthinking and unfeeling classmates.  But he did not flinch at the prospect.  His brother Charles went with him, and in the fall of ’60 they entered Yale College.  If poverty was bitter at Wilbraham, it was bitterer here.  They were utter strangers among hundreds of boys from all parts of the country, the majority of them coming from homes of luxury and with money for all their needs.  At Wilbraham, there had been a certain number of boys from their own section, many of them poor, though few so poor as themselves.  They had not felt so altogether alone as they did at Yale.  It is perhaps for this reason that so little is known of Russell Conwell’s