"'Yes, they will,' I said, cheerfully, keeping at my work. Whereupon he watched me a few minutes longer and said:
"'Well, you can put me down for one hundred dollars for the new building. Come up to my livery-stable and get it this evening.'
"'All right; I'll surely be there,' I replied.
"In a little while another man came along and stopped and looked, and he rather gibed at the idea of a new church and when I told him of the livery-stable man contributing one hundred dollars, he said, 'But you haven't got the money yet!'
"'No,' I said; 'but I am going to get it to-night.'
"'You'll never get it,' he said. 'He's not that sort of a man. He's not even a church man!'
"But I just went quietly on with the work, without answering and after quite a while he left; but he called back, as he went off, 'Well, if he does give you that hundred dollars, come to me and I'll give you another hundred.'"
Conwell smiles in genial reminiscence and without any apparent sense that he is telling of a great personal triumph and goes on:
"Those two men both paid the money, and of course the church people themselves, who at first had not quite understood that I could be in earnest, joined in and helped, with work and money, and as, while the new church was building, it was peculiarly important to get and keep the congregation together, and as they had ceased to have a minister of their own, I used to run out from Boston and preach for them, in a room we hired.
"And it was there in Lexington, in 1879, that I determined to become a minister. I had a good law practice, but I determined to give it up. For many years I had felt more or less of a call to the ministry, and here at length was the definite time to begin.