EARLY ENVIRONMENT

The Family Circle.  An Unusual Mother.  What She Read Her Children.  A Preacher at Three Years of Age.

Such was the heritage and the home into which Russell H. Conwell was born February 15, 1843.  Think what a world his eyes opened upon—­“fair, searching eyes of youth”—­steadfast hills holding mystery and fascination in green depths and purple distances, streams rushing with noisy joy over stony beds, sweet violet gloom of night with brilliant stars moving silently across infinite space; tender moss, delicate fern, creeping vine, covering the brown earth with living beauty—­a fascinating world of loveliness for boyish eyes to look upon and wonder about.

The home inside was as unpretentious as its exterior suggested.  The tiny hall admitted on one side to a bedroom, on the other to a living room, from which opened a room used as a store.  Above was an attic.  The living room was the bright, cheery heart of the house.  The morning sun poured in through two windows which faced the east; a window and door on the south claimed the same cheery rays as the sun journeyed westward.  The big open fireplace made a glowing spot of brightness.  The floor was uncarpeted, the walls unpapered, the furnishing of the simplest, yet cheerfulness and homely comfort pervaded the room as with an almost tangible spirit.

A brother three years older and a sister three years younger made a trio of bright, childish faces about the hearth on winter evenings as the years went by, while the mother read to them such tales as childish minds could grasp.  It was a loving little circle, one that riveted sure and fast the ties of family affection and which helped one boy at her knee in after life to enter with such sure sympathy into the plain, simple lives of the humblest people he met.  He had lived that same life, he knew the family affection that grows with such strength around simple firesides, and those of like circumstances felt this knowledge and opened their hearts to him.

That Miranda Conwell was an unusual woman for those times and circumstances is shown in those readings to her children.  Not only did she read and explain to them the beautiful stories of the Bible, implanting its truths in their impressionable natures to blossom forth later in beautiful deeds; but she read them the best literature of the ancient days as well as current literature.  Into this poor New England home came the “New York Tribune” and the “National Era.”  The letters of foreign correspondents opened to their childish eyes another world and roused ambitions to see it.  Henry Ward Beecher’s sermons, and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” when it came out as a serial, all such good and helpful literature, she poured into the eager childish ears.  These readings went on, all through the happy days of childhood.