"We walked together to Derby that day. At the meeting he spoke a little, and pleased the people. When the meeting was over, he said:—
"'Can't I sleep with you?'
"'Well,' I said, 'I have no objection; but, you know, I am only a lodger.'
"However, go with me he would, and did. That was the man. When John made up his mind to do a thing he did it; and to that feature in his character, no doubt, much of his future success may be attributed. The gentleman at whose house he met me at Nottingham, and who was ashamed of him, subsequently became his servant, and touched his hat to him; and John has pulled up at my own door in his carriage, with a liveried servant, when I lived near to him in London."
John Cassell was now in the thick of the fight. In those days the opposition to the Gospel of Temperance was keen and bitter. Sometimes there were great disturbances at the meetings, sometimes he was pelted with rubbish, at times he did not know where to turn for a night's lodging. It was, on the whole, a fierce conflict; but John was nothing daunted.
It is, of course, impossible to sum up the amount of a man's influence. John Cassell scattered the seed of temperance liberally. Here is a case showing how one of the grains took root, and grew up to bear important fruit.
The Rev. Charles Garrett, the celebrated teetotal President of the Wesleyan Conference, writing several years after John Cassell's death, says:—
"I signed the pledge of total abstinence in 1840, after hearing a lecture on the subject by the late John Cassell. I have therefore tried it for more than thirty years. It has been a blessing to me, and has made me a blessing to others."
How to cure the curse of drink, what to give in its place when the pleasures of the glass were taken away—that was the problem which many have tried to solve. None more successfully than John Cassell.
At a meeting in Exeter Hall he suddenly put a new view before his audience. "I have it!" he exclaimed.