Interesting things were happening in the world then; things that were to mould the future of one of the boys at her knee in a way she little dreamed.  A war was being waged in Mexico to train soldiers for a greater war coming.  Out in Illinois, a plain rail-splitter, farmer and lawyer was beginning to be heard in the cause of freedom and justice for all men, black or white.  These rumors and discussions drifted into the little home and arguments rose high around the crackling woodfire as neighbors dropped in.  Martin Conwell was not a man to watch passively the trend of events.  He took sides openly, vigorously, and though the small, blue-eyed boy listening so attentively did not comprehend all that it was about, Martin Conwell’s views later took shape in action that had a marked bearing on Russell’s later life.

But the mother’s reading bore more immediate, if less useful, fruit.  Hearing rather unusual sounds from the back yard one day, she went to the door to listen.  The evening before she had been reading the children one of the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher and telling them something of this great man and his work.  Mounted upon one of the largest gray rocks in the yard, stood Russell, solemnly preaching to a collection of wondering, round-eyed chickens.  It was a serious, impressive discourse he gave them, much of it, no doubt, a transcript of Henry Ward Beecher’s.  What led his boyish fancy to do it, no one knew, though many another child has done the same, as children dramatize in play the things they have heard or read.  But a chance remark stamped that childish action upon the boyish imagination, making it the corner stone of many a childish castle in Spain.  Telling her husband of it in the evening, Miranda Conwell said, half jokingly, “our boy will some day be a great preacher.”  It was a fertile seed dropped in a fertile mind, tilled assiduously for a brief space by vivid childish imagination; but not ripened till sad experiences of later years brought it to a glorious fruition.

Another result of the fireside readings might have been serious.  A short distance from the house a mountain stream leaps and foams over the stones, seeming to choose, as Ruskin says, “the steepest places to come down for the sake of the leaps, scattering its handfuls of crystal this way and that as the wind takes them.”  The walls of the gorge rise sheer and steep; the path of the stream is strewn with huge boulders, over which it foams snow white, pausing in quiet little pools for breath before the next leap and scramble.  Here and there at the sides, stray tiny little waterfalls, very Thoreaus of streamlets, content to wander off by themselves, away from the noisy rush of the others, making little silvery rills of beauty in unobtrusive ways.  Over this gorge was a fallen log.  Russell determined to enact the part of Eliza in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” fleeing over the ice.  It was a feat to make a mother’s heart stand still.  Three separate times she whipped him severely and forbade him to do it.  He took the punishment cheerfully, and went back to the log.  He never gave up until he had crossed it.