The next summer he preached in Kansas; but was not gone all the time, as when in other States.  When preaching in distant counties he was sometimes gone four or five weeks, but he was sometimes at home a part of every week.  When at home he worked very hard on the farm, to accomplish what he saw must be done, that he might go back to his preaching as soon as possible.  Mother looked after the work in his absence, and was a good manager, but there was much to which she could not attend.  Father was nervously energetic, always working and walking rapidly.  Even after he was sixty years old, although he was a slender man, only five feet nine inches in height, with his right arm trembling with palsy, I have known robust young men to complain that they did not like to work for Pardee Butler, because he would work with them, and they were ashamed to have such an old man do more than they did, and he worked so hard that he wore them out.  He scarcely spent an idle moment.  Other men could be content to pass their time in careless conversation, but he never could.  Unless he had some subject that he thought especially worthy of conversation, he said little.  He seldom spoke of what he had done, and scarcely ever related any of the many experiences of his trips away from home.  In his backwoods boyhood experiences he had learned to make or mend almost every article used by a farmer.  He was full of projects, always improving something on the place.  Every spare moment was used, either in fixing something about the farm, or in reading or writing.  He sometimes complained that the days were not half long enough to suit him.  He once told his sister that the Border Ruffians never knew what a service they did him when they rafted him, for he had leisure to think while he was going down the river.  My brother Charley once said that father was so greedy of time he was afraid he might lose a minute.  Often in the evening we had to make room by the cooking stove for his shaving-horse, or his leather and harness tools, while he worked until ten or eleven o’clock making or mending some implement or harness.  And often, after laboring all day, he read or wrote until eleven or twelve o’clock at night.  He read a great variety of books and newspapers, but was particularly fond of church history and religious books of a doctrinal nature.

He wrote much for various papers, and was a painstaking writer.  He usually wrote his articles two or three times, and the account of his second mob that was written for the Herald of Freedom he re-wrote seven times.  He could write best in the morning, and frequently read and wrote half of the forenoon; and then worked and chored until nine or ten at night, to make up lost time.

Few ever knew the strong desire that he constantly felt for a life devoted wholly to study and preaching.  Living, as we did in those days, in a log house with only one room, he had no private place for study, but read or wrote in the midst of the family.  Yet neither crying babies nor the noisy play of older children distracted him.  Often he sat, with a look of abstraction, in the midst of our conversation; and we frequently had to speak to him several times before we could attract his attention.