Chapter Four.
Conference Membership—Brulitz Creek Ministry—The Modern Knight and his Steed—Abrupt Closing of Family Devotions by a Dog on the Preacher—An Original Marriage Ceremony—A Case of Mistaken Identity—A Banner Missionary Collection—Shawnee Prairie Pastorate—A Cold Day in April—The Redemption of Hell’s Half Acre—Baiting for a Perverse Fish—An Experience in the Whiskey Business.
Rev. Mr. Newgent was received into the Upper Wabash Conference at Milford, Indiana, in the spring of 1859. Bishop David Edwards presided. The Conference had been formed the preceding year by a division of the Wabash Conference territory. As a matter of coincidence he was ordained four years later at the Conference in session at the same place with the same Bishop presiding. He was now in his twenty-first year, having been quite prominent in ministerial labors for about four years, and had a record for zeal, earnestness, and success in revival work that commended him favorably to the Conference.
He was appointed by this Conference to the Brulitz Creek Circuit, which gave him an unlimited field for the exercise of his zeal and talents. The circuit consisted of eighteen appointments, only two of which were at church-houses; the others were at school houses and in private homes. With little or no competition, the circuit-rider was monarch of all he surveyed, though in most cases when he received his appointment he found enough already surveyed to tax his time and energy to the limit. Preaching services were not confined to the Sabbath, but would fall upon any day of the week, and even then the intervals between appointments, except during the periodic “big meeting,” were usually not less than five or six weeks.
The standard mode of travel was by horseback, and the circuit-rider, in addition to his other qualifications, needed to be efficient in horsemanship. This was scarcely necessary in Newgent’s case, however. Not being able to own a horse at this time, he secured the loan of one from an accommodating neighbor. The horse was as accommodating as its owner. It was quite well “broke,” having endured the rigors of some nineteen winters, and was experienced in the various departments of farm work. It had sowed and reaped—and eaten—its wild oats, and was absolutely reliable, at least to the limit of its physical endurance. At any rate the horse had many acknowledged good points, as a faithful portrait would have demonstrated. While it may not have been in its real element on dress parade, it served the more practical purpose of locomotion—to a somewhat limited extent.
As the rider weighed scarcely a hundred pounds, the horse had no cause to complain at his burden. And when it came to matters of appearance, the odds were not so unevenly balanced as might be supposed. The spare-built, smooth-faced youth, clad in his suit of homespun, which was made with a reckless disregard of the lines and proportions of his anatomy, might well have recalled the lines of Shakespeare:
“Would that he were fatter, but I fear him not;
Yet if my name were liable to fear,