About this time Henry earned five dollars for giving a temperance lecture, using the money to buy for his future wife the unusual love-gift of Baxter's "Saints' Rest."
Soon after, he walked to Brattleborough, Vt., fifty miles each way, gave a lecture, for which he received ten dollars, and with a part of the money bought an engagement-ring for Miss Bullard, which was also her wedding-ring, and with the rest the works of Edmund Burke.
This money gave him great satisfaction. "Oh, that bill!" he says. "How it warmed me and invigorated me! I looked at it before going to sleep; I examined my pocket the next morning, to be sure that I had not dreamed it. How I pitied the poor students, who had not, I well knew, ten dollars in their pockets. Still, I tried to keep down pride in its offensive forms. I would not be lifted up."
After he had bought the books, he says, "I was a man that owned a library! I became conservative and frugal. Before, I had spent at least a dollar and a half a year for knickknacks; but, after I had founded a library, I reformed all such wastes, and every penny I could raise or save I compelled to transform itself into books!" When he graduated, he owned about fifty volumes.
Dr. Lyman Beecher having left Boston to become the President of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, Henry and Charles went thither to study theology. The three years spent there were full of pathetic, and sometimes comic, incidents. In this, at that time far West, the fences were poor, and cattle were apt to stray at will over flower-beds and across the gardens. One day Henry found a strange cow lying down on the barn floor. He quickly drove her out, chased her down the street, and, hot and tired, came to the house and threw himself on the sofa.
"There, I guess I have taught one old cow to know where she belongs," he remarked to his father.
"What do you mean?" said the doctor, growing excited. "Well, you have done it. I have just bought that cow, and had to wade the Ohio River twice to get her home; and, after I have got her safely into the barn, you have turned her out. You have done it, and no mistake." And the cow was vigorously hunted up.
During all these years affectionate letters were sent to Eunice Bullard. "What a noble creation E—— is," young Beecher writes in his journal. "I could have looked through ten thousand and never found one so every way suited to me. How dearly do I love her!"
Some of this time was darkened by doubt and disbelief; but, like John Bunyan, after about two years of unsettled condition of mind, peace was assured. "It came to me," he says, "like the bursting of spring. It was as if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen or heard, and as if to-day the woods were full of singing birds. There rose up before me a view of Jesus as the Saviour of sinners,—not of saints, but of sinners unconverted, before they were any better,—because they were so bad and needed so much; and that view has never gone from me.... Never for a single moment have I doubted the power of Christ's love to save me, any more than I have doubted the existence in the heaven of the sun by day and the moon by night."
The second Mrs. Beecher had died, triumphing in her faith. Dr. Beecher, tried for heresy, was fighting theological battles, which his son Henry learned to abhor.