Sundays brought a special sweet relief that summer, a note of finer poetry into all our lives, for often after a bath behind the barn we put on clean shirts and drove away to Osage to meet George and Mitchell, or went to church to see some of the girls we had admired at the Seminary. On other Sabbaths we returned to our places at the Burr Oak school-house, enjoying as we used to do, a few hours' forgetfulness of the farm.

My father, I am glad to say, never insisted upon any religious observance on the part of his sons, and never interfered with any reasonable pleasure even on Sunday. If he made objection to our trips it was usually on behalf of the cattle. "Go where you please," he often said, "only get back in time to do the milking." Sometimes he would ask, "Don't you think the horses ought to have a rest as well as yourselves?" He was a stern man but a just man, and I am especially grateful to him for his non-interference with my religious affairs.

All that summer and all the fall I worked like a hired man, assuming in addition the responsibilities of being boss. I bound grain until my arms were raw with briars and in stacking-time I wallowed round and round upon my knees, building great ricks of grain, taking obvious pride in the skill which this task required until my trousers, reinforced at the knees, bagged ungracefully and my hands, swollen with the act of grappling the heavy bundles as they were thrown to me, grew horny and brown and clumsy, so that I quite despaired of ever being able to write another letter. I was very glad not to have my Seminary friends see me in this unlovely condition.

However, I took a well-defined pride in stacking, for it was a test of skill. It was clean work. Even now, as I ride a country lane, and see men at work handling oats or hay, I recall the pleasurable sides of work on the farm and long to return to it.

The radiant sky of August and September on the prairie was a never failing source of delight to me. Nature seemed resting, opulent, self-satisfied and honorable. Every phase of the landscape indicated a task fulfilled. There were still and pulseless days when slaty-blue clouds piled up in the west and came drifting eastward with thunderous accompaniment, to break the oppressive heat and leave the earth cool and fresh from having passed. There were misty, windy days when the sounding, southern breeze swept the yellow stubble like a scythe; when the sky, without a cloud, was whitened by an overspreading haze; when the crickets sang sleepily as if in dream of eternal summer; and the grasshoppers clicked and buzzed from stalk to stalk in pure delight of sunshine and the harvest.

Another humbler source of pleasure in stacking was the watermelon which, having been picked in the early morning and hidden under the edge of the stack, remained deliciously cool till mid-forenoon, when at a signal, the men all gathered in the shadow of the rick, and leisurely ate their fill of juicy "mountain sweets." Then there was the five o'clock supper, with its milk and doughnuts and pie which sent us back to our task—replete, content, ready for another hour of toil.

Of course, there were unpleasant days later in the month, noons when the skies were filled with ragged, swiftly moving clouds, and the winds blew the sheaves inside out and slashed against my face the flying grain as well as the leaping crickets. Such days gave prophecy of the passing of summer and the coming of fall. But there was a mitigating charm even in these conditions, for they were all welcome promises of an early return to school.

Crickets during stacking time were innumerable and voracious as rust or fire. They ate our coats or hats if we left them beside the stack. They gnawed the fork handles and devoured any straps that were left lying about, but their multitudinous song was a beautiful inwrought part of the symphony.

That year the threshing was done in the fields with a traction engine. My uncle David came no more to help us harvest. He had almost passed out of our life, and I have no recollection of him till several years later. Much of the charm, the poetry of the old-time threshing vanished with the passing of horse power and the coming of the nomadic hired hand. There was less and less of the "changing works" which used to bring the young men of the farms together. The grain was no longer stacked round the stable. Most of it we threshed in the field and the straw after being spread out upon the stubble was burned. Some farmers threshed directly from the shock, and the new "Vibrator" took the place of the old Buffalo Pitts Separator with its ringing bell-metal pinions. Wheeled plows were common and self-binding harvesters were coming in.

Although my laconic little diary does not show it, I was fiercely resolved upon returning to the Seminary. My father was not very sympathetic. In his eyes I already had a very good equipment for the battle of life, but mother, with a woman's ready understanding, divined that I had not merely set my heart on graduating at the Seminary, but that I was secretly dreaming of another and far more romantic career than that of being a farmer. Although a woman of slender schooling herself, she responded helpfully to every effort which her sons made to raise themselves above the commonplace level of neighborhood life.

All through the early fall whenever Burton and I met the other boys of a Sunday our talk was sure to fall upon the Seminary, and Burton stoutly declared that he, too, was going to begin in September. As a matter of fact the autumn term opened while we were still hard at work around a threshing machine with no definite hope of release till the plowing and corn-husking were over. Our fathers did not seem to realize that the men of the future (even the farmers of the future) must have a considerable amount of learning and experience, and so October went by and November was well started before parole was granted and we were free to return to our books.

With what sense of liberty, of exultation, we took our way down the road on that gorgeous autumn morning! No more dust, no more grime, no more mud, no more cow milking, no more horse currying! For five months we were to live the lives of scholars, of boarders.—Yes, through some mysterious channel our parents had been brought to the point of engaging lodgings for us in the home of a townsman named Leete. For two dollars a week it was arranged that we could eat and sleep from Monday night to Friday noon, but we were not expected to remain for supper on Friday; and Sunday supper, was of course, extra. I thought this a great deal of money then, but I cannot understand at this distance how our landlady was able to provide, for that sum, the raw material of her kitchen, to say nothing of bed linen and soap.

The house, which stood on the edge of the town, was small and without upstairs heat, but it seemed luxurious to me, and the family straightway absorbed my interest. Leete, the nominal head of the establishment, was a short, gray, lame and rather inefficient man of changeable temper who teamed about the streets with a span of roans almost as dour and crippled as himself. His wife, who did nearly all the housework for five boarders as well as for the members of her own family, was a soul of heroic pride and most indomitable energy. She was a tall, dark, thin woman who had once been handsome. Poor creature—how incessantly she toiled, and how much she endured!

She had three graceful and alluring daughters,—Ella, nineteen, Cora, sixteen, and Martha, a quiet little mouse of about ten years of age. Ella was a girl of unusual attainment, a teacher, self-contained and womanly, with whom we all, promptly, fell in love. Cora, a moody, dark-eyed, passionate girl who sometimes glowed with friendly smiles and sometimes glowered in anger, was less adored. Neither of them considered Burton or myself worthy of serious notice. On the contrary, we were necessary nuisances.

To me Ella was a queen, a kindly queen, ever ready to help me out with my algebra. Everything she did seemed to me instinct with womanly grace. No doubt she read the worship in my eyes, but her attitude was that of an older sister. Cora, being nearer my own age, awed me not at all. On the contrary, we were more inclined to battle than to coo. Her coolness toward me, I soon discovered, was sustained by her growing interest in a young man from Cerro Gordo County.

We were a happy, noisy gang, and undoubtedly gave poor Mrs. Leete a great deal of trouble. There was Boggs (who had lost part of one ear in some fracas with Jack Frost) who paced up and down his room declining Latin verbs with painful pertinacity, and Burton who loved a jest but never made one, and Joe Pritchard, who was interested mainly in politics and oratory, and finally that criminally well-dressed young book agent (with whom we had very little in common) and myself. In cold weather we all herded in the dining room to keep from freezing, and our weekly scrub took place after we got home to our own warm kitchens and the family wash-tubs.

Life was a pure joy to Burton as to me. Each day was a poem, each night a dreamless sleep! Each morning at half past eight we went to the Seminary and at four o'clock left it with regret. I should like to say that we studied hard every night, burning a great deal of kerosene oil, but I cannot do so.—We had a good time. The learning, (so far as I can recall) was incidental.

It happened that my closest friends, aside from Burton, were pupils of the public school and for that reason I kept my membership in the Adelphian Society which met every Monday evening. My activities there, I find, made up a large part of my life during this second winter. I not only debated furiously, disputing weighty political questions, thus advancing the forensic side of my education, but later in the winter I helped to organize a dramatic company which gave a play for the benefit of the Club Library.

Just why I should have been chosen "stage director" of our "troupe," I cannot say, but something in my ability to declaim Regulus probably led to this high responsibility. At any rate, I not only played the leading juvenile, I settled points of action and costume without the slightest hesitation. Cora was my ingenue opposite, it fell out, and so we played at love-making, while meeting coldly at the family dining table.

Our engagement in the town hall extended through two March evenings and was largely patronized. It would seem that I was a dominant figure on both occasions, for I declaimed a "piece" on the opening night, one of those resounding orations (addressed to the Carthaginians), which we all loved, and which permitted of thunderous, rolling periods and passionate gestures. If my recollection is not distorted, I was masterful that night—at least, Joe Pritchard agreed that I was "the best part of the show." Joe was my friend, and I hold him in especial affection for his hearty praise of my effort.

On this same night I also appeared in a little sketch representing the death of a veteran of the Revolutionary War, in which the dying man beholds in a vision his beloved Leader. Walter Blakeslee was the "Washington" and I, with heavily powdered hair, was the veteran. On the second night I played the juvenile lover in a drama called His Brother's Keeper. Cora as "Shellie," my sweetheart, was very lovely in pink mosquito netting, and for the first time I regretted her interest in the book agent from Cerro Gordo. Strange to say I had no fear at all as I looked out over the audience which packed the town hall to the ceiling. Father and mother were there with Frank and Jessie, all quite dazed (as I imagined) by my transcendent position behind the foot lights.

It may have been this very night that Willard Eaton, the county attorney, spoke to my father saying, "Richard, whenever that boy of yours finishes school and wants to begin to study law, you send him right to me," which was, of course, a very great compliment, for the county attorney belonged to the best known and most influential firm of lawyers in the town. At the moment his offer would have seemed very dull and commonplace to me. I would have refused it.

Our success that night was so great that it appeared a pity not to permit other towns to witness our performance, hence we boldly organized a "tour." We booked a circuit which included St. Ansgar and Mitchell, two villages, one four, the other ten miles to the north. Audacious as this may seem, it was deliberately decided upon, and one pleasant day Mitchell and George and I loaded all our scenery into a wagon and drove away across the prairie to our first "stand" very much as Moliere did in his youth, leaving the ladies to follow (in the grandeur of hired buggies) later in the day.

That night we played with "artistic success"—that is to say, we lost some eighteen dollars, which so depressed the management that it abandoned the tour, and the entire organization returned to Osage in diminished glory. This cut short my career as an actor. I never again took part in a theatrical performance.

Not long after this disaster, "Shellie," as I now called Cora, entered upon some mysterious and romantic drama of her own. The travelling man vanished, and soon after she too disappeared. Where she went, what she did, no one seemed to know, and none of us quite dared to ask. I never saw her again but last year, after nearly forty years of wandering, I was told that she is married and living in luxurious ease near London. Through what deep valleys she has travelled to reach this height, with what loss or gain, I cannot say, but I shall always remember her as she was that night in St. Ansgar, in her pink-mosquito-bar dress, her eyes shining with excitement, her voice vibrant with girlish gladness.

Our second winter at the Seminary passed all too quickly, and when the prairie chickens began to boom from the ridges our hearts sank within us. For the first time the grouse's cheery dance was unwelcome for it meant the closing of our books, the loss of our pleasant companions, the surrender of our leisure, and a return to the mud of the fields.

It was especially hard to say good-bye to Ella and Maud, for though they were in no sense sweethearts they were very pleasant companions. There were others whom it was a pleasure to meet in the halls and to emulate in the class-rooms, and when early in April, we went home to enter upon the familiar round of seeding, corn-planting, corn plowing, harvesting, stacking and threshing, we had only the promise of an occasional trip to town to cheer us.

It would seem that our interest in the girls of Burr Oak had diminished, for we were less regular in our attendance upon services in the little school-house, and whenever we could gain consent to use a horse, we hitched up and drove away to town. These trips have golden, unforgettable charm, and indicate the glamor which approaching manhood was flinging over my world.

My father's world was less jocund, was indeed filled with increasing anxiety, for just before harvest time a new and formidable enemy of the wheat appeared in the shape of a minute, ill-smelling insect called the chinch bug. It already bore an evil reputation with us for it was reported to have eaten out the crops of southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, and, indeed, before barley cutting was well under way the county was overrun with laborers from the south who were anxious to get work in order to recoup them for the loss of their own harvest. These fugitives brought incredible tales of the ravages of the enemy and prophesied our destruction but, as a matter of fact, only certain dry ridges proclaimed the presence of the insect during this year.

The crop was rather poor for other reasons, and Mr. Babcock, like my father, objected to paying board bills. His attitude was so unpromising that Burton and I cast about to see how we could lessen the expense of upkeep during our winter term of school.

Together we decided to hire a room and board ourselves (as many of the other fellows did) and so cut our expenses to a mere trifle. It was difficult, even in those days, to live cheaper than two dollars per week, but we convinced our people that we could do it, and so at last wrung from our mothers a reluctant consent to our trying it. We got away in October, only two weeks behind our fellows.

I well remember the lovely afternoon on which we unloaded our scanty furniture into the two little rooms which we had hired for the term. It was still glorious autumn weather, and we were young and released from slavery. We had a table, three chairs, a little strip of carpet, and a melodeon, which belonged to Burton's sister, and when we had spread our carpet and put up our curtains we took seats, and cocking our feet upon the window sill surveyed our surroundings with such satisfaction as only autocrats of the earth may compass. We were absolute masters of our time—that was our chiefest joy. We could rise when we pleased and go to bed when we pleased. There were no stables to clean, no pigs to feed, nothing marred our days. We could study or sing or dance at will. We could even wrestle at times with none to molest or make us afraid.

My photograph shows the new suit which I had bought on my own responsibility this time, but no camera could possibly catch the glow of inward satisfaction which warmed my heart. It was a brown cassimere, coat, trousers and vest all alike,—and the trousers fitted me! Furthermore as I bought it without my father's help, my selection was made for esthetic reasons without regard to durability or warmth. It was mine—in the fullest sense—and when I next entered chapel I felt not merely draped, but defended. I walked to my seat with confident security, a well-dressed person. I had a "boughten" shirt also, two boxes of paper cuffs, and two new ties, a black one for every day and a white one for Sunday.

I don't know that any of the girls perceived my new suit, but I hoped one or two of them did. The boys were quite outspoken in their approval of it.

I had given up boots, also, for most of the townsmen wore shoes, thus marking the decline of the military spirit. I never again owned a pair of those man-killing top-boots—which were not only hard to get on and off but pinched my toes, and interrupted the flow of my trouser-legs. Thus one great era fades into another. The Jack-boot period was over, the shoe, commonplace and comfortable, had won.

Our housekeeping was very simple. Each of us brought from home on Monday morning a huge bag of doughnuts together with several loaves of bread, and (with a milkman near at hand) our cooking remained rudimentary. We did occasionally fry a steak and boil some potatoes, and I have a dim memory of several disastrous attempts to make flapjacks out of flour and sweet milk. However we never suffered from hunger as some of the other fellows actually did.

Pretty Ethel Beebe comes into the record of this winter, like a quaint illustration to an old-fashioned story, for she lived near us and went to school along the same sidewalk. Burton was always saying, "Some day I am going to brace up and ask Ethel to let me carry her books, and I'm going to walk beside her right down Main Street." But he never did. Ultimately I attained to that incredible boldness, but Burton only followed along behind.

Ethel was a slender, smiling, brown-eyed girl with a keen appreciation of the ridiculous, and I have no doubt she catalogued all our peculiarities, for she always seemed to be laughing at us, and I think it must have been her smiles that prevented any romantic attachment. We walked and talked without any deeper interest than good comradeship.

Mrs. Babcock was famous for her pies and cakes, and Burton always brought some delicious samples of her skill. As regularly as the clock, on every Tuesday evening he said, in precisely the same tone, "Well, now, we'll have to eat these pies right away or they'll spoil," and as I made no objection, we had pie for luncheon, pie and cake for supper, and cake and pie for breakfast until all these "goodies" which were intended to serve as dessert through the week were consumed. By Thursday morning we were usually down to dry bread and butter.

We simplified our housework in other ways in order that we might have time to study and Burton wasted a good deal of time at the fiddle, sawing away till I was obliged to fall upon him and roll him on the floor to silence him.

I still have our ledger which gives an itemized account of the cost of this experiment in self board, and its footings are incredibly small. Less than fifty cents a day for both of us! Of course our mothers, sisters and aunts were continually joking us about our housekeeping, and once or twice Mrs. Babcock called upon us unexpectedly and found the room "a sight." But we did not mind her very much. We only feared the bright eyes of Ethel and Maude and Carrie. Fortunately they could not properly call upon us, even if they had wished to do so, and we were safe. It is probable, moreover, that they fully understood our methods, for they often slyly hinted at hasty dish-washing and primitive cookery. All of this only amused us, so long as they did not actually discover the dirt and disorder of which our mothers complained.

Our school library at that time was pitifully small and ludicrously prescriptive, but its shelves held a few of the fine old classics, Scott, Dickens and Thackeray—the kind of books which can always be had in sets at very low prices—and in nosing about among these I fell, one day, upon two small red volumes called Mosses from an Old Manse. Of course I had read of the author, for these books were listed in my History of American Literature, but I had never, up to this moment, dared to open one of them. I was a discoverer.

I turned a page or two, and instantly my mental horizon widened. When I had finished the Artist of the Beautiful, the great Puritan romancer had laid his spell upon me everlastingly. Even as I walked homeward to my lunch, I read. I ate with the book beside my plate. I neglected my classes that afternoon, and as soon as I had absorbed this volume I secured the other and devoted myself to it with almost equal intensity. The stately diction, the rich and glowing imagery, the mystical radiance, and the aloofness of the author's personality all united to create in me a worshipful admiration which made all other interests pale and faint. It was my first profound literary passion and I was dazzled by the glory of it.

It would be a pleasant task to say that this book determined my career—it would form a delightful literary assumption, but I cannot claim it. As a realist I must remain faithful to fact. I did not then and there vow to be a romantic novelist like Hawthorne. On the contrary, I realized that this great poet (to me he was a poet) like Edgar Allan Poe, was a soul that dwelt apart from ordinary mortals.

To me he was a magician, a weaver of magic spells, a dreamer whose visions comprehended the half-lights, the borderlands, of the human soul. I loved the roll of his words in The March of Time and the quaint phrasing of the Rill from the Town Pump; Rappacini's Daughter whose breath poisoned the insects in the air, uplifted me. Drowne and His Wooden Image, the Great Stone Face—each story had its special appeal. For days I walked amid enchanted mist, my partner—(even the maidens I most admired), became less appealing, less necessary to me. Eager to know more of this necromancer I searched the town for others of his books, but found only American Notes and the Scarlet Letter.

Gradually I returned to something like my normal interests in baseball and my classmates, but never again did I fall to the low level of Jack Harkaway. I now possessed a literary touchstone with which I tested the quality of other books and other minds, and my intellectual arrogance, I fear, sometimes made me an unpleasant companion. The fact that Ethel did not "like" Hawthorne, sank her to a lower level in my estimation.



CHAPTER XIX

End of School Days

Though my years at the Seminary were the happiest of my life they are among the most difficult for me to recover and present to my readers. During half the year I worked on the farm fiercely, unsparing of myself, in order that I might have an uninterrupted season of study in the village. Each term was very like another so far as its broad program went but innumerable, minute but very important progressions carried me toward manhood, events which can hardly be stated to an outsider.

Burton remained my room-mate and in all our vicissitudes we had no vital disagreements but his unconquerable shyness kept him from making a good impression on his teachers and this annoyed me—it made him seem stupid when he was not. Once, as chairman of a committee it became his duty to introduce a certain lecturer who was to speak on "Elihu Burritt," and by some curious twist in my chum's mind this name became "Lu-hi Burritt" and he so stated it in his introductory remarks. This amused the lecturer and raised a titter in the audience. Burton bled in silence over this mishap for he was at heart deeply ambitious to be a public speaker. He never alluded to that speech even to me without writhing in retrospective shame.

Another incident will illustrate his painfully shy character. One of our summer vacations was made notable by the visit of an exceedingly pretty girl to the home of one of Burton's aunts who lived on the road to the Grove, and my chum's excitement over the presence of this alien bird of paradise was very amusing to me as well as to his brother Charles who was inclined, as an older brother, to "take it out" of Burt.

I listened to my chum's account of his cousin's beauty with something more than fraternal interest. She came, it appeared, from Dubuque and had the true cosmopolitan's air of tolerance. Our small community amused her. Her hats and gowns (for it soon developed that she had at least two), were the envy of all the girls, and the admiration of the boys. No disengaged or slightly obligated beau of the district neglected to hitch his horse at Mrs. Knapp's gate.

Burton's opportunity seemed better than that of any other youth, for he could visit his aunt as often as he wished without arousing comment, whereas for me, a call would have been equivalent to an offer of marriage. My only chance of seeing the radiant stranger was at church. Needless to say we all made it a point to attend every service during her stay.

One Sunday afternoon as I was riding over to the Grove, I met Burton plodding homeward along the grassy lane, walking with hanging head and sagging shoulders. He looked like a man in deep and discouraged thought, and when he glanced up at me, with a familiar defensive smile twisting his long lips, I knew something had gone wrong.

"Hello," I said. "Where have you been?"

"Over to Aunt Sallie's," he said.

His long, linen duster was sagging at the sides, and peering down at his pockets I perceived a couple of quarts of lovely Siberian crab-apples. "Where did you get all that fruit?" I demanded.

"At home."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Take it back again."

"What do you mean by such a performance?"

With the swift flush and silent laugh which always marked his confessions of weakness, or failure, he replied, "I went over to see Nettie. I intended to give her these apples," he indicated the fruit by a touch on each pocket, "but when I got there I found old Bill Watson, dressed to kill and large as life, sitting in the parlor. I was so afraid of his finding out what I had in my pockets that I didn't go in. I came away leaving him in possession."

Of course I laughed—but there was an element of pathos in it after all. Poor Burt! He always failed to get his share of the good things in this world.

* * * * *

We continued to board ourselves,—now here, now there, and always to the effect of being starved out by Friday night, but we kept well and active even on doughnuts and pie, and were grateful of any camping place in town.

Once Burton left a soup-bone to simmer on the stove while we went away to morning recitations, and when we reached home, smoke was leaking from every keyhole. The room was solid with the remains of our bone. It took six months to get the horrid smell of charred beef out of our wardrobe. The girls all sniffed and wondered as we came near.

On Fridays we went home and during the winter months very generally attended the Lyceum which met in the Burr Oak school-house. We often debated, and on one occasion I attained to the honor of being called upon to preside over the session. Another memorable evening is that in which I read with what seemed to me distinguished success Joaquin Miller's magnificent new poem, Kit Carson's Ride and in the splendid roar and trample of its lines discovered a new and powerful American poet. His spirit appealed to me. He was at once American and western. I read every line of his verse which the newspapers or magazines brought to me, and was profoundly influenced by its epic quality.

And so, term by term, in growing joy and strength, in expanding knowledge of life, we hurried toward the end of our four years' course at this modest little school, finding in it all the essential elements of an education, for we caught at every chance quotation from the scientists, every fleeting literary allusion in the magazines, attaining, at last, a dim knowledge of what was going on in the great outside world of letters and discovery. Of course there were elections and tariff reforms and other comparatively unimportant matters taking place in the state but they made only the most transient impression on our minds.

During the last winter of our stay at the Seminary, my associate in housekeeping was one Adelbert Jones, the son of a well-to-do farmer who lived directly east of town. "Del," as we called him, always alluded to himself as "Ferguson." He was tall, with a very large blond face inclined to freckle and his first care of a morning was to scrutinize himself most anxiously to see whether the troublesome brown flecks were increasing or diminishing in number. Often upon reaching the open air he would sniff the east wind and say lugubriously, "This is the kind of day that brings out the freckles on your Uncle Ferg."

He was one of the best dressed men in the school, and especially finicky about his collars and ties,—was, indeed, one of the earliest to purchase linen. He also parted his yellow hair in the middle (which was a very noticeable thing in those days) and was always talking of taking a girl to a social or to prayer meeting. But, like Burton, he never did. So far as I knew he never "went double," and most of the girls looked upon him as more or less of a rustic, notwithstanding his fine figure and careful dress.

As for me I did once hire a horse and carriage of a friend and took Alice for a drive! More than thirty-five years have passed since that adventure and yet I can see every turn in that road! I can hear the crackle of my starched shirt and the creak of my suspender buckles as I write.

Alice, being quite as bashful as myself, kept our conversation to the high plane of Hawthorne and Poe and Schiller with an occasional tired droop to the weather, hence I infer that she was as much relieved as I when we reached her boarding house some two hours later. It was my first and only attempt at this, the most common of all ways of entertaining one's best girl.

The youth who furnished the carriage betrayed me, and the outcry of my friends so intimidated me that I dared not look Alice in the face. My only comfort was that no one but ourselves could possibly know what an erratic conversationalist I had been. However, she did not seem to lay it up against me. I think she was as much astonished as I and I am persuaded that she valued the compliment of my extravagant gallantry.

It is only fair to say that I had risen by this time to the dignity of "boughten shirts," linen collars and "Congress gaiters," and my suit purchased for graduating purposes was of black diagonal with a long tail, a garment which fitted me reasonably well. It was hot, of course, and nearly parboiled me of a summer evening, but I bore my suffering like the hero that I was, in order that I might make a presentable figure in the eyes of my classmates. I longed for a white vest but did not attain to that splendor.

Life remained very simple and very democratic in our little town. Although the county seat, it was slow in taking on city ways. I don't believe a real bath-tub distinguished the place (I never heard of one) but its sidewalks kept our feet out of the mud (even in March or April), and this was a marvellous fact to us. One or two fine lawns and flower gardens had come in, and year by year the maples had grown until they now made a pleasant shade in June, and in October glorified the plank walks. To us it was beautiful.

As county town, Osage published two papers and was, in addition, the home of two Judges, a state Senator and a Congressman. A new opera house was built in '79 and an occasional "actor troupe" presented military plays like Our Boys or farces like Solon Shingle. The brass band and the baseball team were the best in the district, and were loyally upheld by us all.

With all these attractions do you wonder that whenever Ed and Bill and Joe had a day of leisure they got out their buggies, washed them till they glistened like new, and called for their best girls on the way to town?

Circuses, Fourth of Julys, County Fairs, all took place in Osage, and to own a "covered rig" and to take your sweetheart to the show were the highest forms of affluence and joy—unless you were actually able to live in town, as Burton and I now did for five days in each week, in which case you saw everything that was free and denied yourself everything but the circus. Nobody went so far in economy as that.

As a conscientious historian I have gone carefully into the records of this last year, in the hope of finding something that would indicate a feeling on the part of the citizens that Dick Garland's boy was in some ways a remarkable youth, but (I regret to say) I cannot lay hands on a single item. It appears that I was just one of a hundred healthy, hearty, noisy students—but no, wait! There is one incident which has slight significance. One day during my final term of school, as I stood in the postoffice waiting for the mail to be distributed, I picked up from the counter a book called The Undiscovered Country.

"What is this about?" I asked.

The clerk looked up at me with an expression of disgust. "I bought it for a book of travel," said he, "but it is only a novel. Want it? I'll sell it cheap."

Having no money to waste in that way, I declined, but as I had the volume in my hands, with a few minutes to spare, I began to read. It did not take me long to discover in this author a grace and precision of style which aroused both my admiration and my resentment. My resentment was vague, I could not have given a reason for it, but as a matter of fact, the English of this new author made some of my literary heroes seem either crude or stilted. I was just young enough and conservative enough to be irritated and repelled by the modernity of William Dean Howells.

I put the book down and turned away, apparently uninfluenced by it. Indeed, I remained, if anything, more loyal to the grand manner of Hawthorne, but my love of realism was growing. I recall a rebuke from my teacher in rhetoric, condemning, in my essay on Mark Twain, an over praise of Roughing It. It is evident, therefore that I was even then a lover of the modern when taken off my guard.

Meanwhile I had definitely decided not to be a lawyer, and it happened in this way. One Sunday morning as I was walking toward school, I met a young man named Lohr, a law student several years older than myself, who turned and walked with me for a few blocks.

"Well, Garland," said he, "what are you going to do after you graduate this June?"

"I don't know," I frankly replied. "I have a chance to go into a law office."

"Don't do it," protested he with sudden and inexplicable bitterness. "Whatever you do, don't become a lawyer's hack."

His tone and the words, "lawyer's hack" had a powerful effect upon my mind. The warning entered my ears and stayed there. I decided against the law, as I had already decided against the farm.

* * * * *

Yes, these were the sweetest days of my life for I was carefree and glowing with the happiness which streams from perfect health and unquestioning faith. If any shadow drifted across this sunny year it fell from a haunting sense of the impermanency of my leisure. Neither Burton nor I had an ache or a pain. We had no fear and cherished no sorrow, and we were both comparatively free from the lover's almost intolerable longing. Our loves were hardly more than admirations.

As I project myself back into those days I re-experience the keen joy I took in the downpour of vivid sunlight, in the colorful clouds of evening, and in the song of the west wind harping amid the maple leaves. The earth was new, the moonlight magical, the dawns miraculous. I shiver with the boy's solemn awe in the presence of beauty. The little recitation rooms, dusty with floating chalk, are wide halls of romance and the voices of my girl classmates (even though their words are algebraic formulas), ring sweet as bells across the years.

* * * * *

During the years '79 and '80, while Burton and I had been living our carefree jocund life at the Seminary, a series of crop failures had profoundly affected the county, producing a feeling of unrest and bitterness in the farmers which was to have a far-reaching effect on my fortunes as well as upon those of my fellows. For two years the crop had been almost wholly destroyed by chinch bugs.

The harvest of '80 had been a season of disgust and disappointment to us for not only had the pestiferous mites devoured the grain, they had filled our stables, granaries, and even our kitchens with their ill-smelling crawling bodies—and now they were coming again in added billions. By the middle of June they swarmed at the roots of the wheat—innumerable as the sands of the sea. They sapped the growing stalks till the leaves turned yellow. It was as if the field had been scorched, even the edges of the corn showed signs of blight. It was evident that the crop was lost unless some great change took place in the weather, and many men began to offer their land for sale.

Naturally the business of grain-buying had suffered with the decline of grain-growing, and my father, profoundly discouraged by the outlook, sold his share in the elevator and turned his face toward the free lands of the farther west. He became again the pioneer.

DAKOTA was the magic word. The "Jim River Valley" was now the "land of delight," where "herds of deer and buffalo" still "furnished the cheer." Once more the spirit of the explorer flamed up in the soldier's heart. Once more the sunset allured. Once more my mother sang the marching song of the McClintocks,

O'er the hills in legions, boys, Fair freedom's star Points to the sunset regions, boys, Ha, ha, ha-ha!

and sometime, in May I think it was, father again set out—this time by train, to explore the Land of The Dakotas which had but recently been wrested from the control of Sitting Bull.

He was gone only two weeks, but on his return announced with triumphant smile that he had taken up a homestead in Ordway, Brown County, Dakota. His face was again alight with the hope of the borderman, and he had much to say of the region he had explored.

As graduation day came on, Burton and I became very serious. The question of our future pressed upon us. What were we to do when our schooling ended? Neither of us had any hope of going to college, and neither of us had any intention of going to Dakota, although I had taken "Going West" as the theme of my oration. We were also greatly worried about these essays. Burton fell off in appetite and grew silent and abstracted. Each of us gave much time to declaiming our speeches, and the question of dress troubled us. Should we wear white ties and white vests, or white ties and black vests?

The evening fell on a dark and rainy night, but the Garlands came down in their best attire and so did the Babcocks, the Gilchrists and many other of our neighbors. Burton was hoping that his people would not come, he especially dreaded the humorous gaze of his brother Charles who took a much less serious view of Burton's powers as an orator than Burton considered just. Other interested parents and friends filled the New Opera House to the doors, producing in us a sense of awe for this was the first time the "Exercises" had taken place outside the chapel.

Never again shall I feel the same exultation, the same pleasure mingled with bitter sadness, the same perception of the irrevocable passing of beautiful things, and the equally inexorable coming on of care and trouble, as filled my heart that night. Whether any of the other members of my class vibrated with similar emotion or not I cannot say, but I do recall that some of the girls annoyed me by their excessive attentions to unimportant ribbons, flounces, and laces. "How do I look?" seemed their principal concern. Only Alice expressed anything of the prophetic sadness which mingled with her exultation.

The name of my theme, (which was made public for the first time in the little programme) is worthy of a moment's emphasis. Going West had been suggested, of course by the emigration fever, then at its height, and upon it I had lavished a great deal of anxious care. As an oration it was all very excited and very florid, but it had some stirring ideas in it and coming in the midst of the profound political discourses of my fellows and the formal essays of the girls, it seemed much more singular and revolutionary, both in form and in substance, than it really was.

As I waited my turn, I experienced that sense of nausea, that numbness which always preceded my platform trials, but as my name was called I contrived to reach the proper place behind the footlights, and to bow to the audience. My opening paragraph perplexed my fellows, and naturally, for it was exceedingly florid, filled with phrases like "the lure of the sunset," "the westward urge of men," and was neither prose nor verse. Nevertheless I detected a slight current of sympathy coming up to me, and in the midst of the vast expanse of faces, I began to detect here and there a friendly smile. Mother and father were near but their faces were very serious.

After a few moments the blood began to circulate through my limbs and I was able to move about a little on the stage. My courage came back, but alas!—just in proportion as I attained confidence my emotional chant mounted too high! Since the writing was extremely ornate, my manner should have been studiedly cold and simple. This I knew perfectly well, but I could not check the perfervid rush of my song. I ranted deplorably, and though I closed amid fairly generous applause, no flowers were handed up to me. The only praise I received came from Charles Lohr, the man who had warned me against becoming a lawyer's hack. He, meeting me in the wings of the stage as I came off, remarked with ironic significance, "Well, that was an original piece of business!"

This delighted me exceedingly, for I had written with special deliberate intent to go outside the conventional grind of graduating orations. Feeling dimly, but sincerely, the epic march of the American pioneer I had tried to express it in an address which was in fact a sloppy poem. I should not like to have that manuscript printed precisely as it came from my pen, and a phonographic record of my voice would serve admirably as an instrument of blackmail. However, I thought at the time that I had done moderately well, and my mother's shy smile confirmed me in the belief.

Burton was white with stage-fright as he stepped from the wings but he got through very well, better than I, for he attempted no oratorical flights.

Now came the usual hurried and painful farewells of classmates. With fervid hand-clasp we separated, some of us never again to meet. Our beloved principal (who was even then shadowed by the illness which brought about his death) clung to us as if he hated to see us go, and some of us could not utter a word as we took his hand in parting. What I said to Alice and Maud and Ethel I do not know, but I do recall that I had an uncomfortable lump in my throat while saying it.

As a truthful historian, I must add that Burton and I, immediately after this highly emotional close of our school career, were both called upon to climb into the family carriage and drive away into the black night, back to the farm,—an experience which seemed to us at the time a sad anticlimax. When we entered our ugly attic rooms and tumbled wearily into our hard beds, we retained very little of our momentary sense of victory. Our carefree school life was ended. Our stern education in life had begun.



CHAPTER XX

The Land of the Dakotas

The movement of settlers toward Dakota had now become an exodus, a stampede. Hardly anything else was talked about as neighbors met one another on the road or at the Burr Oak school-house on Sundays. Every man who could sell out had gone west or was going. In vain did the county papers and Farmer's Institute lecturers advise cattle raising and plead for diversified tillage, predicting wealth for those who held on; farmer after farmer joined the march to Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota. "We are wheat raisers," they said, "and we intend to keep in the wheat belt."

Our own family group was breaking up. My uncle David of pioneer spirit had already gone to the far Missouri Valley. Rachel had moved to Georgia, and Grandad McClintock was with his daughters, Samantha and Deborah, in western Minnesota. My mother, thus widely separated from her kin, resigned herself once more to the thought of founding a new home. Once more she sang, "O'er the hills in legions, boys," with such spirit as she could command, her clear voice a little touched with the huskiness of regret.

I confess I sympathized in some degree with my father's new design. There was something large and fine in the business of wheat-growing, and to have a plague of insects arise just as our harvesting machinery was reaching such perfection that we could handle our entire crop without hired help, was a tragic, abominable injustice. I could not blame him for his resentment and dismay.

My personal plans were now confused and wavering. I had no intention of joining this westward march; on the contrary, I was looking toward employment as a teacher, therefore my last weeks at the Seminary were shadowed by a cloud of uncertainty and vague alarm. It seemed a time of change, and immense, far-reaching, portentous readjustment. Our homestead was sold, my world was broken up. "What am I to do?" was my question.

Father had settled upon Ordway, Brown County, South Dakota, as his future home, and immediately after my graduation, he and my brother set forth into the new country to prepare the way for the family's removal, leaving me to go ahead with the harvest alone. It fell out, therefore, that immediately after my flowery oration on Going West I found myself more of a slave to the cattle than ever before in my life.

Help was scarce; I could not secure even so much as a boy to aid in milking the cows; I was obliged to work double time in order to set up the sheaves of barley which were in danger of mouldering on the wet ground. I worked with a kind of bitter, desperate pleasure, saying, "This is the last time I shall ever lift a bundle of this accursed stuff."

And then, to make the situation worse, in raising some heavy machinery connected with the self-binder, I strained my side so seriously that I was unable to walk. This brought the harvesting to a stand, and made my father's return necessary. For several weeks I hobbled about, bent like a gnome, and so helped to reap what the chinch bugs had left, while my mother prepared to "follow the sunset" with her "Boss."

September first was the day set for saying good-bye to Dry Run, and it so happened that her wedding anniversary fell close upon the same date and our neighbors, having quietly passed the word around, came together one Sunday afternoon to combine a farewell dinner with a Silver Wedding "surprise party."

Mother saw nothing strange in the coming of the first two carriages, the Buttons often came driving in that way,—but when the Babcocks, the Coles, and the Gilchrists clattered in with smiling faces, we all stood in the yard transfixed with amazement. "What's the meaning of all this?" asked my father.

No one explained. The women calmly clambered down from their vehicles, bearing baskets and bottles and knobby parcels, and began instant and concerted bustle of preparation. The men tied their horses to the fence and hunted up saw-horses and planks, and soon a long table was spread beneath the trees on the lawn. One by one other teams came whirling into the yard. The assembly resembled a "vandoo" as Asa Walker said. "It's worse than that," laughed Mrs. Turner. "It's a silver wedding and a 'send off' combined."

They would not let either the "bride" or the "groom" do a thing, and with smiling resignation my mother folded her hands and sank into a chair. "All right," she said. "I am perfectly willing to sit by and see you do the work. I won't have another chance right away." And there was something sad in her voice. She could not forget that this was the beginning of a new pioneering adventure.

The shadows were long on the grass when at the close of the supper old John Gammons rose to make a speech and present the silver tea set. His voice was tremulous with emotion as he spoke of the loss which the neighborhood was about to suffer, and tears were in many eyes when father made reply. The old soldier's voice failed him several times during his utterance of the few short sentences he was able to frame, and at last he was obliged to take his seat, and blow his nose very hard on his big bandanna handkerchief to conceal his emotion.

It was a very touching and beautiful moment to me, for as I looked around upon that little group of men and women, rough-handed, bent and worn with toil, silent and shadowed with the sorrow of parting, I realized as never before the high place my parents had won in the estimation of their neighbors. It affected me still more deeply to see my father stammer and flush with uncontrollable emotion. I had thought the event deeply important before, but I now perceived that our going was all of a piece with the West's elemental restlessness. I could not express what I felt then, and I can recover but little of it now, but the pain which filled my throat comes back to me mixed with a singular longing to relive it.

There, on a low mound in the midst of the prairie, in the shadow of the house we had built, beneath the slender trees we had planted, we were bidding farewell to one cycle of emigration and entering upon another. The border line had moved on, and my indomitable Dad was moving with it. I shivered with dread of the irrevocable decision thus forced upon me. I heard a clanging as of great gates behind me and the field of the future was wide and wan.

From this spot we had seen the wild prairies disappear. On every hand wheat and corn and clover had taken the place of the wild oat, the hazelbush and the rose. Our house, a commonplace frame cabin, took on grace. Here Hattie had died. Our yard was ugly, but there Jessie's small feet had worn a slender path. Each of our lives was knit into these hedges and rooted in these fields and yet, notwithstanding all this, in response to some powerful yearning call, my father was about to set out for the fifth time into the still more remote and untrodden west. Small wonder that my mother sat with bowed head and tear-blinded eyes, while these good and faithful friends crowded around her to say good-bye.

She had no enemies and no hatreds. Her rich singing voice, her smiling face, her ready sympathy with those who suffered, had endeared her to every home into which she had gone, even as a momentary visitor. No woman in childbirth, no afflicted family within a radius of five miles had ever called for her in vain. Death knew her well, for she had closed the eyes of youth and age, and yet she remained the same laughing, bounteous, whole-souled mother of men that she had been in the valley of the Neshonoc. Nothing could permanently cloud her face or embitter the sunny sweetness of her creed.

One by one the women put their worn, ungraceful arms about her, kissed her with trembling lips, and went away in silent grief. The scene became too painful for me at last, and I fled away from it—out into the fields, bitterly asking, "Why should this suffering be? Why should mother be wrenched from all her dearest friends and forced to move away to a strange land?"

* * * * *

I did not see the actual packing up and moving of the household goods, for I had determined to set forth in advance and independently, eager to be my own master, and at the moment I did not feel in the least like pioneering.

Some two years before, when the failure of our crop had made the matter of my continuing at school an issue between my father and myself, I had said, "If you will send me to school until I graduate, I will ask nothing further of you," and these words I now took a stern pleasure in upholding. Without a dollar of my own, I announced my intention to fare forth into the world on the strength of my two hands, but my father, who was in reality a most affectionate parent, offered me thirty dollars to pay my carfare.

This I accepted, feeling that I had abundantly earned this money, and after a sad parting with my mother and my little sister, set out one September morning for Osage. At the moment I was oppressed with the thought that this was the fork in the trail, that my family and I had started on differing roads. I had become a man. With all the ways of the world before me I suffered from a feeling of doubt. The open gate allured me, but the homely scenes I was leaving suddenly put forth a latent magic.

I knew every foot of this farm. I had traversed it scores of times in every direction, following the plow, the harrow, or the seeder. With a great lumber wagon at my side I had husked corn from every acre of it, and now I was leaving it with no intention of returning. My action, like that of my father, was final. As I looked back up the lane at the tall Lombardy poplar trees bent like sabres in the warm western wind, the landscape I was leaving seemed suddenly very beautiful, and the old home very peaceful and very desirable. Nevertheless I went on.

Try as I may, I cannot bring back out of the darkness of that night any memory of how I spent the time. I must have called upon some of my classmates, but I cannot lay hold upon a single word or look or phrase from any of them. Deeply as I felt my distinction in thus riding forth into the world, all the tender incidents of farewell are lost to me. Perhaps my boyish self-absorption prevented me from recording outside impressions, for the idea of travelling, of crossing the State line, profoundly engaged me. Up to this time, notwithstanding all my dreams of conquest in far countries, I had never ridden in a railway coach! Can you wonder therefore that I trembled with joyous excitement as I paced the platform next morning waiting for the chariot of my romance? The fact that it was a decayed little coach at the end of a "mixed accommodation train" on a stub road did not matter. I was ecstatic.

However, I was well dressed, and my inexperience appeared only in a certain tense watchfulness. I closely observed what went on around me and was careful to do nothing which could be misconstrued as ignorance. Thrilling with excitement, feeling the mighty significance of my departure, I entered quietly and took my seat, while the train roared on through Mitchell and St. Ansgar, the little towns in which I had played my part as an actor,—on into distant climes and marvellous cities. My emotion was all very boyish, but very natural as I look back upon it.

The town in which I spent my first night abroad should have been called Thebes or Athens or Palmyra; but it was not. On the contrary, it was named Ramsey, after an old pioneer, and no one but a youth of fervid imagination at the close of his first day of adventure in the world would have found it worth a second glance. To me it was both beautiful and inspiring, for the reason that it was new territory and because it was the home of Alice, my most brilliant school mate, and while I had in mind some notion of a conference with the county superintendent of schools, my real reason for stopping off was a desire to see this girl whom I greatly admired.

I smile as I recall the feeling of pride with which I stepped into the 'bus and started for the Grand Central Hotel. And yet, after all, values are relative. That boy had something which I have lost. I would give much of my present knowledge of the world for the keen savor of life which filled my nostrils at that time.

The sound of a violin is mingled with my memories of Ramsey, and the talk of a group of rough men around the bar-room stove is full of savage charm. A tall, pale man, with long hair and big black eyes, one who impressed me as being a man of refinement and culture, reduced by drink to poverty and to rebellious bitterness of soul, stands out in powerful relief—a tragic and moving figure.

Here, too, I heard my first splendid singer. A patent medicine cart was in the street and one of its troupe, a basso, sang Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep with such art that I listened with delight. His lion-like pose, his mighty voice, his studied phrasing, revealed to me higher qualities of musical art than I had hitherto known.

From this singer, I went directly to Alice's home. I must have appeared singularly exalted as I faced her. The entire family was in the sitting room as I entered—but after a few kindly inquiries concerning my people and some general remarks they each and all slipped away, leaving me alone with the girl—in the good old-fashioned American way.

It would seem that in this farewell call I was permitting myself an exaggeration of what had been to Alice only a pleasant association, for she greeted me composedly and waited for me to justify my presence.

After a few moments of explanation, I suggested that we go out and hear the singing of the "troupe." To this she consented, and rose quietly—she never did anything hurriedly or with girlish alertness—and put on her hat. Although so young, she had the dignity of a woman, and her face, pale as a silver moon, was calm and sweet, only her big gray eyes expressed the maiden mystery. She read my adoration and was a little afraid of it.

As we walked, I spoke of the good days at "the Sem," of our classmates, and their future, and this led me to the announcement of my own plans. "I shall teach," I said. "I hope to be able to work into a professorship in literature some day.—What do you intend to do?"

"I shall go on with my studies for a while," she replied. "I may go to some eastern college for a few years."

"You must not become too learned," I urged. "You'll forget me."

She did not protest this as a coquette might have done. On the contrary, she remained silent, and I was aware that while she liked and respected me, she was not profoundly moved by this farewell call. Nevertheless I hoped, and in that hope I repeated, "You will write to me, won't you?"

"Of course!" she replied, and again I experienced a chilling perception that her words arose from friendliness rather than from tenderness, but I was glad of even this restrained promise, and I added, "I shall write often, for I shall be lonely—for a while."

As I walked on, the girl's soft warm arm in mine, a feeling of uncertainty, of disquiet, took possession of me. "Success" seemed a long way off and the road to it long and hard. However, I said nothing further concerning my doubts.

The street that night had all the enchantment of Granada to me. The girl's voice rippled with a music like that of the fountain Lindarazza, and when I caught glimpses of her sweet, serious face beneath her hat-rim, I dreaded our parting. The nearer to her gate we drew the more tremulous my voice became, and the more uncertain my step.

At last on the door-step she turned and said, "Won't you come in again?"

In her tone was friendly dismissal, but I would not have it so. "You will write to me, won't you?" I pleaded with choking utterance.

She was moved (by pity perhaps).

"Why, yes, with pleasure," she answered. "Good-bye, I hope you'll succeed. I'm sure you will."

She extended her hand and I, recalling the instructions of my most romantic fiction, raised it to my lips. "Good-bye!" I huskily said, and turned away.

My next night was spent in Faribault. Here I touched storied ground, for near this town Edward Eggleston had laid the scene of his novel, The Mystery of Metropolisville and my imagination responded to the magic which lay in the influence of the man of letters. I wrote to Alice a long and impassioned account of my sensations as I stood beside the Cannonball River.

My search for a school proving futile, I pushed on to the town of Farmington, where the Dakota branch of the Milwaukee railroad crossed my line of march. Here I felt to its full the compelling power of the swift stream of immigration surging to the west. The little village had doubled in size almost in a day. It was a junction point, a place of transfer, and its thin-walled unpainted pine hotels were packed with men, women and children laden with bags and bundles (all bound for the west) and the joyous excitement of these adventurers compelled me to change my plan. I decided to try some of the newer counties in western Minnesota. Romance was still in the West for me.

I slept that night on the floor in company with four or five young Iowa farmers, and the smell of clean white shavings, the wailing of tired children, the excited muttering of fathers, the plaintive voices of mothers, came through the partitions at intervals, producing in my mind an effect which will never pass away. It seemed to me at the moment as if all America were in process of change, all hurrying to overtake the vanishing line of the middle border, and the women at least were secretly or openly doubtful of the outcome. Woman is not by nature an explorer. She is the home-lover.

Early the next morning I bought a ticket for Aberdeen, and entered the train crammed with movers who had found the "prairie schooner" all too slow. The epoch of the canvas-covered wagon had passed. The era of the locomotive, the day of the chartered car, had arrived. Free land was receding at railroad speed, the borderline could be overtaken only by steam, and every man was in haste to arrive.

All that day we rumbled and rattled into a strange country, feeding our little engine with logs of wood, which we stopped occasionally to secure from long ricks which lined the banks of the river. At Chaska, at Granite Falls, I stepped off, but did not succeed in finding employment. It is probable that being filled with the desire of exploration I only half-heartedly sought for work; at any rate, on the third day, I found myself far out upon the unbroken plain where only the hairlike buffalo grass grew—beyond trees, beyond the plow, but not beyond settlement, for here at the end of my third day's ride at Millbank, I found a hamlet six months old, and the flock of shining yellow pine shanties strewn upon the sod, gave me an illogical delight, but then I was twenty-one—and it was sunset in the Land of the Dakotas!

All around me that night the talk was all of land, land! Nearly every man I met was bound for the "Jim River valley," and each voice was aquiver with hope, each eye alight with anticipation of certain success. Even the women had begun to catch something of this enthusiasm, for the night was very beautiful and the next day promised fair.

Again I slept on a cot in a room of rough pine, slept dreamlessly, and was out early enough to witness the coming of dawn,—a wonderful moment that sunrise was to me. Again, as eleven years before, I felt myself a part of the new world, a world fresh from the hand of God. To the east nothing could be seen but a vague expanse of yellow plain, misty purple in its hollows, but to the west rose a long low wall of hills, the Eastern Coteaux, up which a red line of prairie fire was slowly creeping.

It was middle September. The air, magnificently crisp and clear, filled me with desire of exploration, with vague resolution to do and dare. The sound of horses and mules calling for their feed, the clatter of hammers and the rasping of saws gave evidence of eager builders, of alert adventurers, and I was hotly impatient to get forward.

At eight o'clock the engine drew out, pulling after it a dozen box-cars laden with stock and household goods, and on the roof of a freight caboose, together with several other young Jasons, I rode, bound for the valley of the James.

It was a marvellous adventure. All the morning we rattled and rumbled along, our engine snorting with effort, struggling with a load almost too great for its strength. By noon we were up amid the rounded grassy hills of the Sisseton Reservation where only the coyote ranged and the Sioux made residence.

Here we caught our first glimpse of the James River valley, which seemed to us at the moment as illimitable as the ocean and as level as a floor, and then pitching and tossing over the rough track, with our cars leaping and twisting like a herd of frightened buffaloes, we charged down the western slope, down into a level land of ripened grass, where blackbirds chattered in the willows, and prairie chickens called from the tall rushes which grew beside the sluggish streams.

Aberdeen was the end of the line, and when we came into it that night it seemed a near neighbor to Sitting Bull and the bison. And so, indeed, it was, for a buffalo bull had been hunted across its site less than a year before.

It was twelve miles from here to where my father had set his stakes for his new home, hence I must have stayed all night in some small hotel, but that experience has also faded from my mind. I remember only my walk across the dead-level plain next day. For the first time I set foot upon a landscape without a tree to break its sere expanse—and I was at once intensely interested in a long flock of gulls, apparently rolling along the sod, busily gathering their morning meal of frosted locusts. The ones left behind kept flying over the ones in front so that a ceaseless change of leadership took place.

There was beauty in this plain, delicate beauty and a weird charm, despite its lack of undulation. Its lonely unplowed sweep gave me the satisfying sensation of being at last among the men who held the outposts,—sentinels for the marching millions who were approaching from the east. For two hours I walked, seeing Aberdeen fade to a series of wavering, grotesque notches on the southern horizon line, while to the north an equally irregular and insubstantial line of shadows gradually took on weight and color until it became the village in which my father was at this very moment busy in founding his new home.

My experienced eyes saw the deep, rich soil, and my youthful imagination looking into the future, supplied the trees and vines and flowers which were to make this land a garden.

I was converted. I had no doubts. It seemed at the moment that my father had acted wisely in leaving his Iowa farm in order to claim his share of Uncle Sam's rapidly-lessening unclaimed land.



CHAPTER XXI

The Grasshopper and the Ant

Without a doubt this trip, so illogical and so recklessly extravagant, was due entirely to a boy's thirst for adventure. Color it as I may, the fact of my truancy remains. I longed to explore. The valley of the James allured me, and though my ticket and my meals along the route had used up my last dollar, I felt amply repaid as I trod this new earth and confronted this new sky—for both earth and sky were to my perception subtly different from those of Iowa and Minnesota.

The endless stretches of short, dry grass, the gorgeous colors of the dawn, the marvellous, shifting, phantom lakes and headlands, the violet sunset afterglow,—all were widely different from our old home, and the far, bare hills were delightfully suggestive of the horseman, the Indian and the buffalo. The village itself was hardly more than a summer camp, and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of "corner lots" and "boulevards," and their chantings were timed to the sound of hammers. The spirit of the builder seized me and so with my return ticket in my pocket, I joined the carpenters at work on my father's claim some two miles from the village with intent to earn money for further exploration.

Grandfather Garland had also taken a claim (although he heartily disliked the country) and in order to provide for both families a double house was being built across the line between the two farms. I helped shingle the roof, and being twenty-one now, and my own master, I accepted wages from my father without a qualm. I earned every cent of my two dollars per day, I assure you, but I carefully omitted all reference to shingling, in my letters to my classmates.

At the end of a fortnight with my pay in my pocket I started eastward on a trip which I fully intended to make very long and profoundly educational. That I was green, very green, I knew but all that could be changed by travel.

At the end of my second day's journey, I reached Hastings, a small town on the Mississippi river, and from there decided to go by water to Redwing some thirty miles below. All my life I had longed to ride on a Mississippi steamboat, and now, as I waited on the wharf at the very instant of the fulfillment of my desire, I expanded with anticipatory satisfaction.

The arrival of the War Eagle from St. Paul carried a fine foreign significance, and I ascended its gang-plank with the air of a traveller embarking at Cairo for Assouan. Once aboard the vessel I mingled, aloofly, with the passengers, absorbed in study of the river winding down among its wooded hills.

This ecstasy lasted during the entire trip—indeed it almost took on poetic form as the vessel approached the landing at Redwing, for at this point the legendary appeal made itself felt. This lovely valley had once been the home of a chieftain, and his body, together with that of his favorite warhorse, was buried on the summit of a hill which overlooks the river, "in order" (so runs the legend) "that the chief might see the first faint glow of the resurrection morn and ride to meet it."

In truth Redwing was a quiet, excessively practical little town, quite commonplace to every other passenger, except myself. My excited imagination translated it into something very distinctive and far-off and shining.

I took lodgings that night at a very exclusive boarding house at six dollars per week, reckless of the effect on my very slender purse. For a few days I permitted myself to wander and to dream. I have disturbing recollections of writing my friends from this little town, letters wherein I rhapsodized on the beauty of the scenery in terms which I would not now use in describing the Grand Canyon, or in picturing the peaks of Wyoming. After all I was right. A landscape is precisely as great as the impression it makes upon the perceiving mind. I was a traveller at last!—that seemed to be my chiefest joy and I extracted from each day all the ecstasy it contained.

My avowed object was to obtain a school and I did not entirely neglect my plans but application to the county superintendent came to nothing. I fear I was half-hearted in my campaign.

At last, at the beginning of the week and at the end of my money, I bought passage to Wabasha and from there took train to a small town where some of my mother's cousins lived. I had been in correspondence with one of them, a Mrs. Harris, and I landed at her door (after a glorious ride up through the hills, amid the most gorgeous autumn colors) with just three cents in my pocket—a poverty which you may be sure I did not publish to my relations who treated me with high respect and manifested keen interest in all my plans.

As nothing offered in the township round about the Harris home, I started one Saturday morning to walk to a little cross-roads village some twenty miles away, in which I was told a teacher was required. My cousins, not knowing that I was penniless, supposed, of course, that I would go by train, and I was too proud to tell them the truth. It was very muddy, and when I reached the home of the committeeman his mid-day meal was over, and his wife did not ask if I had dined—although she was quick to tell me that the teacher had just been hired.

Without a cent in my pocket, I could not ask for food—therefore, I turned back weary, hungry and disheartened. To make matters worse a cold rain was falling and the eighteen or twenty miles between me and the Harris farm looked long.

I think it must have been at this moment that I began, for the first time, to take a really serious view of my plan "to see the world." It became evident with startling abruptness, that a man might be both hungry and cold in the midst of abundance. I recalled the fable of the grasshopper who, having wasted the summer hours in singing, was mendicant to the ant. My weeks of careless gayety were over. The money I had spent in travel looked like a noble fortune to me at this hour.

The road was deep in mud, and as night drew on the rain thickened. At last I said, "I will go into some farm-house and ask the privilege of a bed." This was apparently a simple thing to do and yet I found it exceedingly hard to carry out. To say bluntly, "Sir, I have no money, I am tired and hungry," seemed a baldly disgraceful way of beginning. On the other hand to plead relationship with Will Harris involved a relative, and besides they might not know my cousin, or they might think my statement false.

Arguing in this way I passed house after house while the water dripped from my hat and the mud clogged my feet. Though chilled and hungry to the point of weakness, my suffering was mainly mental. A sudden realization of the natural antagonism of the well-to-do toward the tramp appalled me. Once, as I turned in toward the bright light of a kitchen window, the roar of a watch dog stopped me before I had fairly passed the gate. I turned back with a savage word, hot with resentment at a house-owner who would keep a beast like that. At another cottage I was repulsed by an old woman who sharply said, "We don't feed tramps."

I now had the precise feeling of the penniless outcast. With morbidly active imagination I conceived of myself as a being forever set apart from home and friends, condemned to wander the night alone. I worked on this idea till I achieved a bitter, furtive and ferocious manner.

However, I knocked at another door and upon meeting the eyes of the woman at the threshold, began with formal politeness to explain, "I am a teacher, I have been to look for a school, and I am on my way back to Byron, where I have relatives. Can you keep me all night?"

The woman listened in silence and at length replied with ungracious curtness, "I guess so. Come in."

She gave me a seat by the fire, and when her husband returned from the barn, I explained the situation to him. He was only moderately cordial. "Make yourself at home. I'll be in as soon as I have finished my milking," he said and left me beside the kitchen fire.

The woman of the house, silent, suspicious (it seemed to me) began to spread the table for supper while I, sitting beside the stove, began to suffer with the knowledge that I had, in a certain sense, deceived them. I was fairly well dressed and my voice and manner, as well as the fact that I was seeking a school, had given them, no doubt, the impression that I was able to pay for my entertainment, and the more I thought of this the more uneasy I became. To eat of their food without making an explanation was impossible but the longer I waited the more difficult the explanation grew.

Suffering keenly, absurdly, I sat with hanging head going over and over the problem, trying to formulate an easy way of letting them know my predicament. There was but one way of escape—and I took it. As the woman stepped out of the room for a moment, I rose, seized my hat and rushed out into the rain and darkness like a fugitive.

I have often wondered what those people thought when they found me gone. Perhaps I am the great mystery of their lives, an unexplained visitant from "the night's Plutonian shore."

I plodded on for another mile or two in the darkness, which was now so intense I could scarcely keep the road. Only by the feel of the mud under my feet could I follow the pike. Like Jean Valjean, I possessed a tempest in my brain. I experienced my first touch of despair.

Although I had never had more than thirty dollars at any one time, I had never been without money. Distinctions had not counted largely in the pioneer world to which I belonged. I was proud of my family. I came of good stock, and knew it and felt it, but now here I was, wet as a sponge and without shelter simply because I had not in my pocket a small piece of silver with which to buy a bed.

I walked on until this dark surge of rebellious rage had spent its force and reason weakly resumed her throne. I said, "What nonsense! Here I am only a few miles from relatives. All the farmers on this road must know the Harris family. If I tell them who I am, they will certainly feel that I have the claim of a neighbor upon them."—But these deductions, admirable as they were, did not lighten my sky or make begging easier.

After walking two miles further I found it almost impossible to proceed. It was black night and I did not know where I stood. The wind had risen and the rain was falling in slant cataracts. As I looked about me and caught the gleam from the windows of a small farmhouse, my stubborn pride gave way. Stumbling up the path I rapped on the door. It was opened by a middle-aged farmer in his stocking feet, smoking a pipe. Having finished his supper he was taking his ease beside the fire, and fortunately for me, was in genial mood.

"Come in," he said heartily. "'Tis a wet night."

I began, "I am a cousin of William Harris of Byron—"

"You don't say! Well, what are you doing on the road a night like this? Come in!"

I stepped inside and finished my explanation there.

This good man and his wife will forever remain the most hospitable figures in my memory. They set me close beside the stove insisting that I put my feet in the oven to dry, talking meanwhile of my cousins and the crops, and complaining of the incessant rainstorms which were succeeding one another almost without intermission, making this one of the wettest and most dismal autumns the country had ever seen. Never in all my life has a roof seemed more heavenly, or hosts more sweet and gracious.

After breakfast next morning I shook hands with the farmer saying: "I shall send you the money for my entertainment the first time my cousin comes to town," and under the clamor of his hospitable protestations against payment, set off up the road.

The sun came out warm and beautiful and all about me on every farm the teamsters were getting into the fields. The mud began to dry up and with the growing cheer of the morning my heart expanded and the experience of the night before became as unreal as a dream and yet it had happened, and it had taught me a needed lesson. Hereafter I take no narrow chances, I vowed to myself.

Upon arrival at my cousin's home I called him aside and said, "Will, you have work to do and I have need of wages,—I am going to strip off this 'boiled shirt' and white collar, and I am going to work for you just the same as any other hand, and I shall expect the full pay of the best man on your place."

He protested, "I don't like to see you do this. Don't give up your plans. I'll hitch up and we'll start out and keep going till we find you a school."

"No," I said, "not till I earn a few dollars to put in my pocket. I've played the grasshopper for a few weeks—from this time on I'm the busy ant."

So it was settled, and the grasshopper went forth into the fields and toiled as hard as any slave. I plowed, threshed, and husked corn, and when at last December came, I had acquired money enough to carry me on my way. I decided to visit Onalaska and the old coulee where my father's sister and two of the McClintocks were still living. With swift return of confidence, I said good-bye to my friends in Zumbrota and took the train. It seemed very wonderful that after a space of thirteen years I should be returning to the scenes of my childhood, a full-grown man and paying my own way. I expanded with joy of the prospect.

Onalaska, the reader may remember, was the town in which I had gone to school when a child, and in my return to it I felt somewhat like the man in the song, Twenty Years Ago—indeed I sang, "I've wandered through the village, Tom, I've sat beneath the tree" for my uncle that first night. There was the river, filled as of old with logs, and the clamor of the saws still rose from the sawdust islands. Bleakly white the little church, in which we used to sit in our Sunday best, remained unchanged but the old school-house was not merely altered, it was gone! In its place stood a commonplace building of brick. The boys with whom I used to play "Mumblety Peg" were men, and some of them had developed into worthless loafers, lounging about the doors of the saloons, and although we looked at one another with eyes of sly recognition, we did not speak.

Eagerly I visited the old coulee, but the magic was gone from the hills, the glamour from the meadows. The Widow Green no longer lived at the turn of the road, and only the Randals remained. The marsh was drained, the big trees cleared away. The valley was smaller, less mysterious, less poetic than my remembrances of it, but it had charm nevertheless, and I responded to the beauty of its guarding bluffs and the deep-blue shadows which streamed across its sunset fields.

Uncle William drove down and took me home with him, over the long hill, back to the little farm where he was living much the same as I remembered him. One of his sons was dead, the other had shared in the rush for land, and was at this time owner of a homestead in western Minnesota. Grandfather McClintock, still able to walk about, was spending the autumn with William and we had a great deal of talk concerning the changes which had come to the country and especially to our family group. "Ye scatter like the leaves of autumn," he said sadly—then added, "Perhaps in the Final Day the trumpet of the Lord will bring us all together again."

We sang some of his old Adventist hymns together and then he asked me what I was planning to do. "I haven't any definite plans," I answered, "except to travel. I want to travel. I want to see the world."

"To see the world!" he exclaimed. "As for me I wait for it to pass away. I watch daily for the coming of the Chariot."

This gray old crag of a man interested me as deeply as ever and yet, in a sense, he was an alien. He was not of my time—scarcely of my country. He was a survival of the days when the only book was the Bible, when the newspaper was a luxury. Migration had been his lifelong adventure and now he was waiting for the last great remove. His thought now was of "the region of the Amaranth," his new land "the other side of Jordan."

He engaged my respect but I was never quite at ease with him. His valuations were too intensely religious; he could not understand my ambitions. His mind filled with singular prejudices,—notions which came down from the Colonial age, was impervious to new ideas. His character had lost something of its mellow charm—but it had gained in dramatic significance. Like my uncles he had ceased to be a part of my childish world.

I went away with a sense of sadness, of loss as though a fine picture on the walls of memory had been dimmed or displaced. I perceived that I had idealized him as I had idealized all the figures and scenes of my boyhood—"but no matter, they were beautiful to me then and beautiful they shall remain," was the vague resolution with which I dismissed criticism.

The whole region had become by contrast with Dakota, a "settled" community. The line of the middle border had moved on some three hundred miles to the west. The Dunlaps, McIldowneys, Dudleys and Elwells were the stay-at-homes. Having had their thrust at the job of pioneering before the war they were now content on their fat soil. To me they all seemed remote. Their very names had poetic value, for they brought up in my mind shadowy pictures of the Coulee country as it existed to my boyish memories.

I spent nearly two months in Onalaska, living with my Aunt Susan, a woman of the loveliest character. Richard Bailey, her husband, one of the kindliest of men, soon found employment for me, and so, for a time, I was happy and secure.

However, this was but a pause by the roadside. I was not satisfied. It was a show of weakness to settle down on one's relations. I wanted to make my way among strangers. I scorned to lean upon my aunt and uncle, though they were abundantly able to keep me. It was mid-winter, nothing offered and so I turned (as so many young men similarly placed have done), toward a very common yet difficult job. I attempted to take subscriptions for a book.

After a few days' experience in a neighboring town I decided that whatever else I might be fitted for in this world, I was not intended for a book agent. Surrendering my prospectus to the firm, I took my way down to Madison, the capital of the state, a city which seemed at this time very remote, and very important in my world. Only when travelling did I have the feeling of living up to the expectations of Alice and Burton who put into their letters to me, an envy which was very sweet. To them I was a bold adventurer!

Alas for me! In the shining capital of my state I felt again the world's rough hand. First of all I tried The State House. This was before the general use of typewriters and I had been told that copyists were in demand. I soon discovered that four men and two girls were clamoring for every job. Nobody needed me. I met with blunt refusals and at last turned to other fields.

Every morning I went among the merchants seeking an opportunity to clerk or keep books, and at last obtained a place at six dollars per week in the office of an agricultural implement firm. I was put to work in the accounting department, as general slavey, under the immediate supervision of a youth who had just graduated from my position and who considered me his legitimate victim. He was only seventeen and not handsome, and I despised him with instant bitterness. Under his direction I swept out the office, made copies of letters, got the mail, stamped envelopes and performed other duties of a manual routine kind, to which I would have made no objection, had it not been for the gloating joy with which that chinless cockerel ordered me about. I had never been under that kind of discipline, and to have a pin-headed gamin order me to clean spittoons was more than I could stomach.

At the end of the week I went to the proprietor, and said, "If you have nothing better for me to do than sweep the floor and run errands, I think I'll quit."

With some surprise my boss studied me. At last he said: "Very well, sir, you can go, and from all accounts I don't think we'll miss you much," which was perfectly true. I was an absolute failure so far as any routine work of that kind was concerned.

So here again I was thrown upon a cruel world with only six dollars between myself and the wolf. Again I fell back upon my physical powers. I made the round of all the factories seeking manual labor. I went out on the Catfish, where, through great sheds erected for the manufacture of farm machinery, I passed from superintendent to foreman, from foreman to boss,—eager to wheel sand, paint woodwork, shovel coal—anything at all to keep from sending home for money—for, mind you, my father or my uncle would have helped me out had I written to them, but I could not do that. So long as I was able to keep a roof over my head, I remained silent. I was in the world and I intended to keep going without asking a cent from anyone. Besides, the grandiloquent plans for travel and success which I had so confidently outlined to Burton must be carried out.

I should have been perfectly secure had it been summertime, for I knew the farmer's life and all that pertained to it, but it was winter. How to get a living in a strange town was my problem. It was a bright, clear, intensely cold February, and I was not very warmly dressed—hence I kept moving.

Meanwhile I had become acquainted with a young clergyman in one of the churches, and had showed to him certain letters and papers to prove that I was not a tramp, and no doubt his word kept my boarding mistress from turning me into the street.

Mr. Eaton was a man of books. His library contained many volumes of standard value and we met as equals over the pages of Scott and Dickens. I actually forced him to listen to a lecture which I had been writing during the winter and so wrought upon him that he agreed to arrange a date for me in a neighboring country church.—Thereafter while I glowed with absurd dreams of winning money and renown by delivering that lecture in the churches and school-houses of the state, I continued to seek for work, any work that would bring me food and shelter.

One bitter day in my desperate need I went down upon the lake to watch the men cutting ice. The wind was keen, the sky gray and filled with glittering minute flecks of frost, and my clothing (mainly cotton) seemed hardly thicker than gossamer, and yet I looked upon those working men with a distinct feeling of envy. Had I secured "a job" I should have been pulling a saw up and down through the ice, at the same time that I dreamed of touring the west as a lecturer—of such absurd contradictions are the visions of youth.

I don't know exactly what I would have done had not my brother happened along on his way to a school near Chicago. To him I confessed my perplexity. He paid my board bill (which was not very large) and in return I talked him into a scheme which promised great things for us both—I contracted to lecture under his management! He was delighted at the opportunity of advancing me, and we were both happy.

Our first engagement was at Cyene, a church which really belonged to Eaton's circuit, and according to my remembrance the lecture was a moderate success. After paying all expenses we had a little money for carfare, and Franklin was profoundly impressed. It really seemed to us both that I had at last entered upon my career. It was the kind of service I had been preparing for during all my years at school—but alas! our next date was a disaster. We attempted to do that which an older and fully established lecturer would not have ventured. We tried to secure an audience with only two days' advance work, and of course we failed.

I called a halt. I could not experiment on the small fund which my father had given Frank for his business education.

However, I borrowed a few dollars of him and bought a ticket to Rock River, a town near Chicago. I longed to enter the great western metropolis, but dared not do so—yet. I felt safe only when in sight of a plowed field.

At a junction seventy miles out of the city, we separated, he to attend a school, and I to continue my education in the grim realities of life.

From office to office in Rock River I sullenly plodded, willing to work for fifty cents a day, until at last I secured a clerkship in a small stationery jobbing house which a couple of school teachers had strangely started, but on Saturday of the second week the proprietor called me to him and said kindly, but firmly, "Garland, I'm afraid you are too literary and too musical for this job. You have a fine baritone voice and your ability to vary the text set before you to copy, is remarkable, and yet I think we must part."

The reasons for this ironical statement were (to my mind) ignoble; first of all he resented my musical ability, secondly, my literary skill shamed him, for as he had put before me a badly composed circular letter, telling me to copy it one hundred times, I quite naturally improved the English.—However, I admitted the charge of insubordination, and we parted quite amicably.

It was still winter, and I was utterly without promise of employment. In this extremity, I went to the Y. M. C. A. (which had for one of its aims the assistance of young men out of work) and confided my homelessness to the secretary, a capital young fellow who knew enough about men to recognize that I was not a "bum." He offered me the position of night-watch and gave me a room and cot at the back of his office. These were dark hours!

During the day I continued to pace the streets. Occasionally some little job like raking up a yard would present itself, and so I was able to buy a few rolls, and sometimes I indulged in milk and meat. I lived along from noon to noon in presentable condition, but I was always hungry. For four days I subsisted on five cents worth of buns.

Having left my home for the purpose of securing experience in the world, I had this satisfaction—I was getting it! Very sweet and far away seemed all that beautiful life with Alice and Burton and Hattie at the Seminary, something to dream over, to regret, to versify, something which the future (at this moment) seemed utterly incapable of reproducing. I still corresponded with several of my classmates, but was careful to conceal the struggle that I was undergoing. I told them only of my travels and my reading.

As the ironical jobber remarked, I had a good voice, and upon being invited to accompany the Band of Hope which went to sing and pray in the County Jail, I consented, at least I took part in the singing. In this way I partly paid the debt I owed the Association, and secured some vivid impressions of prison life which came into use at a later time. My three associates in this work were a tinner, a clothing salesman and a cabinet maker. More and more I longed for the spring, for with it I knew would come seeding, building and a chance for me.

At last in the midst of a grateful job of raking up yards and planting shrubs, I heard the rat-tat-tat of a hammer, and resolved upon a bold plan. I decided to become a carpenter, justifying myself by reference to my apprenticeship to my grandfather. One fine April morning I started out towards the suburbs, and at every house in process of construction approached the boss and asked for a job. Almost at once I found encouragement. "Yes, but where are your tools?"

In order to buy the tools I must work, work at anything. Therefore, at the next place I asked if there was any rough labor required around the house. The foreman replied: "Yes, there is some grading to be done." Accordingly I set to work with a wheelbarrow, grading the bank around the almost completed building. This was hard work, the crudest form of manual labor, but I grappled with it desperately, knowing that the pay (a dollar and a half a day) would soon buy a kit of tools.

Oh, that terrible first day! The heavy shovel blistered my hands and lamed my wrists. The lifting of the heavily laden wheelbarrow strained my back and shoulders. Half-starved and weak, quite unfitted for sustained effort of this kind, I struggled on, and at the end of an interminable afternoon staggered home to my cot. The next morning came soon,—too soon. I was not merely lame, I was lacerated. My muscles seemed to have been torn asunder, but I toiled (or made a show of toiling) all the second day. On the warrant of my wages I borrowed twenty-five cents of a friend and with this bought a meat dinner which helped me through another afternoon.