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ts, in a low-roofed cottage in the eastern Berkshires, in Massachusetts.
``I was born in this room,'' he said to me, simply, as we sat together recently[3] in front of the old fireplace in the principal room of the little cottage; for he has bought back the rocky farm of his father, and has retained and restored the little old home. ``I was born in this room. It was bedroom and kitchen. It was poverty.'' And his voice sank with a kind of grimness into silence.
[3] _This interview took place at the old Conwell farm in the summer of 1915_.
Then he spoke a little of the struggles of those long-past years; and we went out on the porch, as the evening shadows fell, and looked out over the valley and stream and hills of his youth, and he told of his grandmother, and of a young Marylander who had come to the region on a visit; it was a tale of the impetuous love of those two, of rash marriage, of the interference of parents, of the fierce rivalry of another suitor, of an attack on the Marylander's life, of passionate hastiness, of unforgivable words, of separation, of lifelong sorrow. ``Why does grandmother cry so often?'' he remembers asking when he was a little boy. And he was told that it was for the husband of her youth.
We went back into the little house, and he showed me the room in which he first saw John Brown. ``I came down early one morning, and saw a huge, hairy man sprawled upon the bed there--and I was frightened,'' he says.
But John Brown did not long frighten him! For he was much at their house after that, and was so friendly with Russell and his brother that there was no chance for awe; and it gives a curious side- light on the character of the stern abolitionist that he actually, with infinite patience, taught the old horse of the Conwells to go home alone with the wagon after leaving the boys at school, a mile or more away, and at school-closing time to trot gently off for them without a driver when merely faced in that direction and told to go! Conwell remembers how
