After staying with various relatives and travelling, Eben settles into studying to become a Baptist minister at the Woodstock Literary Institute.  He and Mary move to Beachville, then to Bothwell where he ministers from 1866-1870.  His detailed and entertaining entries capture the vagaries of his relationships, the growth of the Baptist Church, and Bothwell during its extraordinary oil boom of the 1860s.  Suffering from heart problems, he returns to New York State in 1870 and dies at age thirty.