“Ah, thought I, if this is the way to make men, I do not want to be a man.  I cried over it bitterly, and prayed, too.  But on I started, cheered by my presiding elder, Brother J. Sale.  If I ever saw hard times, surely it was this year; yet many of the people were kind and treated me friendly.  I had hard work to keep soul and body together.  The first Methodist house I came to the brother was a Universalist.  I crossed over the Muskingum River to Marietta.  The first Methodist family I stopped with there, the lady was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, but a thorough Universalist.  She was a thin-faced, Roman-nosed, loquacious Yankee, glib on the tongue, and you may depend upon it I had a hard race to keep up with her, though I found it a good school, for it set me to reading my Bible.  And here permit me to say, of all the isms I ever heard of, they were here.  These descendants of the Puritans were generally educated, but their ancestors were rigid predestinarians, and as they were sometimes favored with a little light on their moral powers, and could just ‘see men as trees walking,’ they jumped into Deism, Universalism, Unitarianism, etc., etc.  I verily believe it was the best school I ever entered.  They waked me up on all sides; Methodism was feeble, and I had to battle or run, and I resolved on the former.”

Just before he was made an elder, Mr. Cartwright left his circuit, and went home on a visit to recruit.  He had made a good fight with poverty during his labors, and at the time of his departure for home he was in a condition sufficiently hard to test any man’s fortitude.  “I had been from my father’s house for three years,” says he; “was five hundred miles from home, my horse had gone blind, my saddle was worn out, my bridle reins had been eaten up and replaced (after a sort) at least a dozen times, and my clothes had been patched till it was difficult to detect the original.  I had concluded to make my way home and get another outfit.  I was in Marietta, and had just seventy-five cents in my pocket.  How I would get home and pay my way I could not tell.”

He did reach home, however, after many characteristic adventures, and obtained another outfit, and while there he took an important step—­he married.  “After a mature deliberation and prayer,” he says, “I thought it was my duty to marry, and was joined in marriage to Frances Gaines, on the 18th of August, 1808, which was her nineteenth birthday.”  Peter and his bride knew that a hard life was in store for them, but they felt strong in the love they bore each other.  They were simple backwoods folk, and their wants were few.  “When I started as a traveling preacher,” he said fifty-three years afterward, “a single preacher was allowed to receive eighty dollars per annum if his circuit would give it to him; but single preachers in those days seldom received over thirty or forty dollars, and often much less; and had it not been for a few