At this time they were living in two rooms back of his office, for they were making financial headway as yet but slowly.  But times brightened and Colonel Conwell was soon able to purchase a handsome home and furnish it comfortably, taking particular pride in the gathering of a large law library.

It seemed now as if life were to move forward prosperously.  But greater work was needed from Russell Conwell than the comfortable practice of law.  One evening while the family were from home, fire broke out and the house and all they owned was destroyed.  Running to the fire from a G.A.R. meeting, a mile and a half away, Colonel Conwell was attacked with a hemorrhage of the lungs.  It came from his old army wounds and the doctor ordered him immediately from that climate, and told him he must take a complete rest.  Here was disaster indeed.  Every cent they had saved was gone.  And with it the strength to begin again the battle for a living.  It was a hard, bitter blow for a young, ambitious man, right at the start of his career; a stroke of fate to make any man bitter and cynical.  But his was not a nature to permit misfortune to narrow him or make him repine.  He rose above it.  It did not lesson his ambitions.  It broadened, humanized them.  It made him enter with still truer sympathy into other people’s misfortune.  And his trust in God was so strong, his faith so unshaken, he knew that in all these bitter experiences of life’s school was a lesson.  He learned it and used it to get a broader outlook.

His friends rallied to his aid.  Prominent as an editor, lawyer, leader of the Y.M.C.A., it was not difficult to get him an appointment from the Governor, already a warm friend.  He secured the position of emigration agent to Europe, and he turned his face Eastward.  Mrs. Conwell was left in Minneapolis, and he sailed abroad in the hope that the sea trip and change of climate would heal the weakened tissue of his lung and fully restore him to health.  But it was a vain hope.  His strength would not permit him to fulfill the duty expected of him as emigration agent and he was compelled to resign.  For several months he wandered about Europe trying one place, then another in the vain search for health.  He joined a surveying party and went to Palestine, for even in those days that inner voice could not he altogether stilled that was calling him to follow in the footsteps of the Savior and preach and teach and heal the sick.  The land where the Savior ministered had a strong fascination for him, and he gladly seized the opportunity to become a member of this surveying party and walk over the ground where the Savior had gone up and down doing good.

But the trip was of no benefit to his health.  Instead of gaining he failed.  He grew weaker and weaker.  The hemorrhages became more and more frequent.  Finally he came to Paris and lying, a stranger and poor, in Necker Hospital was told he could live but a few days.  Face to face again with that grim, bitter enemy of the battlefield, what thoughts came crowding thick and fast—­thoughts of his young wife in far-away America, of father and mother, memories of the beautiful woods, the singing streams of the mountain home, as the noise and clamor of Paris streets drifted into the long hospital ward.