Our preacher did visit New England in 1852, not as a missionary, however, but as a delegate to the General Conference which met that year in Boston.  His fame had preceded him, and he was one of the marked men of that body.  Every one had heard some quaint story of his devotion to his cause, his fearlessness, or his eccentricities, and crowds came out to hear him preach.  But our backwoods preacher was ill at ease.  The magnificence of the city, and the prim decorum of the Boston churches, subdued him, and he could not preach with the fire and freedom of the frontier log chapel.  The crowds that came to hear him were disappointed, and more than once they told him so.

“Is this Peter Cartwright, from Illinois, the old Western pioneer?” they asked him once.

He answered them, “I am the very man.”

“Well,” said several of them, “brother, we are much disappointed; you have fallen very much under our expectations, we expected to hear a much greater sermon than that you preached to-day.”

It was a regular Bostonian greeting, and it not only mortified and disheartened the old pioneer, but it irritated him.  “I tell you,” says he, “they roused me, and provoked what little religious patience I had....  I left them abruptly, and in very gloomy mood retreated to my lodgings, but took very little rest in sleep that night.  I constantly asked myself this question:  Is it so, that I can not preach? or what is the matter?  I underwent a tremendous crucifixion in feeling.”

The result was that he came to the conclusion that he could preach, and that the people of Boston had not “sense enough to know a good sermon when they heard it.”  A little later old Father Taylor, that good genius of the Boston Bethel, a man after Cartwright’s own heart, came to him and asked him to preach for him, and this, after hesitating, our preacher agreed to do, upon the condition that he should be allowed to conduct the services in regular Western style.

“In the meantime,” says he, “I had learned from different sources that the grand reason of my falling under the expectations of the congregations I had addressed was substantially this:  almost all those curious incidents that had gained currency throughout the country concerning Methodist preachers had been located on me, and that when the congregations came to hear me, they expected little else but a bundle of eccentricities and singularities, and when they did not realize according to their anticipations, they were disappointed, and that this was the reason they were disappointed.  So on the Sabbath, when I came to the Bethel, we had a good congregation, and after telling them that Brother Taylor had given me the liberty to preach to them after the Western fashion, I took my text, and after a few common-place remarks, I commenced giving them some Western anecdotes, which had a thrilling effect on the congregation, and excited them immoderately—­I can not say religiously; but I thought if ever I saw animal excitement, it was then and there.  This broke the charm.  During my stay, after this, I could pass anywhere for Peter Cartwright, the old pioneer of the West.  I am not sure that after this I fell under the expectations of my congregations among them.”