During the summer of 1851 the cholera raged in Milwaukee in a most appalling manner.  The whole city was a hospital.  For several days together it was claimed there were fifty deaths per day.  Though earnestly entreated to leave the city, as many others had done, I declined, feeling that my life was no more precious than the lives of others.  Besides, it seemed to me, if there is ever a time when a people need the aid of their Pastor, it is when they are in peril and affliction.  When at the height of its ravages, I repeatedly attended six funerals a day, and visited a dozen sick persons.  The very men whom I met at a funeral one day, I would bury the next.  Mingling thus daily with the sick and dying, I could not well escape myself.  I suffered two attacks during the season, but through great mercy, the lives both of myself and family were spared.

During this terrible visitation I had frequent opportunities to test the value of the Christian religion.  So marked was the difference between the death-bed scenes of Christians and the unconverted that even Infidels themselves could not refrain from referring to it.  As if to teach the people this great lesson, there were a few instances of triumphant deaths, and a few of the opposite class.  One good sister, as she was gliding across the stream, enquired, “Is this Jordan?” She was told it was.  “How calm and placid are its waters,” she added.  “I expected to find the billows running high, but, glory to Jesus! there is not a ripple upon all the stream.”

Unlike this scene was the death of a young man who had sent for me in great haste.  On entering the room, I recognized him as a young man whom I had repeatedly urged, during our meeting of the previous winter, to give himself to the Saviour.  He was now in the throes of dissolution and I could hardly hope to reach him.  Wild with frenzy, he seemed to pray and curse with the same breath.  As a momentary interval occurred between the paroxysms, I sought to arrest his attention and divert his thought to Christ.  He turned his piercing eyes on me and said, “Oh! it is too late.  Last winter, if I had yielded to your kind admonitions, all would now be well, but it is too late, too late.”  Another paroxysm seized him, and he was lost to all consciousness, and soon ceased to breathe.

Another event occurred this year of which mention should be made in this connection.  It is the notorious riot.  I quote from “Milwaukee Methodism.”  “Rev. Mr. Leahy, a minister in the Protestant Methodist Church, after visiting several of the principal cities of the Union, came to Milwaukee.  Having spent many years in a monastery, and having become convinced of his error, he now sought to enlighten the people on the subject of the confessional.  He proposed, in coming to the city, to give a course of lectures in a public hall during the ensuing week.  On the intervening Sabbath he was invited to occupy several of the Pulpits of the city.  He had already