244 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



day. You are a very dutiful little wife. The train which 

 was due at La Crosse at midnight did not arrive till six in 

 the morning. There was no sleeping coach, and the in- 

 fernal cars were hotter than ovens. Not a wink of sleep 

 did I get, and my eyes became much irritated. I got here 

 at noon, and ah, how solid and dense was my sleep last 

 night ! It has left me rather exhausted. . . . 



At Freeport there was a protracted meeting in full blast 

 in every church in town except the Episcopal, and a general 

 feeling of pious rage at my appearance on the scene. The 

 Presbyterian clergyman alone, a cold-blooded but highly 

 intelligent man, who had been reluctantly driven into the 

 revivalist movement by sheer competition, appointed his 

 meetings at half-past six, so that people could come to the 

 lecture at eight. My first audience accordingly consisted 

 of about a hundred stragglers from prayer meeting. In 

 my lecture I of course assumed the antiquity of the earth, 

 and that was enough ! It got abroad the next day, and 

 was reverberated through the town that " Prof. Youmans is 

 an avowed and unblushing infidel." There was a deuce of 

 a time. I was called upon and offensively catechised as to 

 what I believed. Questions were written out by a clergy- 

 man and sent to me to be promptly answered in public. 

 The next night it was scarcely better; but the gentlemen 

 who had my lectures in charge, seeing how things were 

 going and determined not to be baffled, crowded the house 

 the last two nights with pupils of the schools let in free — 

 a capital arrangement, for I would always rather talk to 

 them than to the old folks. At the close of the last lecture 

 I gave them a piece of my mind in a dignified way. I 

 turned the tables on them, and showed that the real infidels 

 are those people who have so little faith in God and in his 

 universe as to be skeptical about the wholesomeness of 

 demonstrated truths. It was a successful hit. After I had 

 finished, a splendid-looking man, ever so much like Uncle 



