Whitefield preached under conditions and to audiences known to no other orators. Passing over Hampton Common, he finds a crowd of 12,000 people collected to see a man hung in chains. Here is an audience, a pulpit, a text; and straightway he captures the crowd! He preaches to another vast multitude assembled to see a man hanged, and the hangman himself suspends his office while Whitefield discourses. Some wandering players have set up their stage at a country fair; the crowd rushes together to grin and jest. But Whitefield suddenly appears, turns the whole scene to religious uses, spoils the players’ harvest, and preaches a sermon of overwhelming power.—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”
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OPPORTUNITIES UNUTILIZED
The Macon Telegraph says that Macon men in Florida laugh to see natives opening canned tomatoes in sight of tomato plants loaded with ripe fruit. Then the said Macon men go to their own homes and buy Florida shad, at Washington Market prices, altho their own river is full of them; and the Telegraph asks: “Is it not a little singular?” Bless you, no! The same sort of thing is going on all over the country. There is not a year when hams and bacon do not bring higher prices in some great pork-producing counties of the West than they do in New York. There are Southern counties where the watermelon grows so easily that the small boy scorns to steal it, yet in some towns in these counties a watermelon costs twice as much as in any Northern city. There are cattle-ranches in the West where milk, when there is any, brings fifty cents a quart, and great grain farms on the prairies whose owners never in their lives tasted an ear of sweet-corn. And, coming back to the shad, there are times when these fish are running up our own river by tens of thousands that a breakfast of shad costs more than one of beefsteak, altho the shad comes right to town and needs only to be taken from a net, while the beef has to be fed at least three years and then brought half-way across the continent by rail. No, there’s nothing singular about it, except in the fact that where food products most abound human nature seems most incompetent to make full use of its opportunities. America is, above all others, a land of plenty, but no one would imagine it after looking at a price-list of family supplies.—New York Herald.
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OPPORTUNITY
Senator J. J. Ingalls wrote the first of these poems not long before he died, the only poetry he is known to have composed. In reply, Walter Malone wrote the second selection:
I
Master of human destinies am I,
Fame, love and fortune on my footsteps wait,