of the terrible war; the fate of Turkey, and so forth.

Very few of our old-country neighbors gave much heed to what are
called spirit-rappings. On the contrary, they were regarded as a sort
of sleight-of-hand humbug. Some of these spirits seem to be stout
able-bodied fellows, judging by the weights they lift and the heavy
furniture they bang about. But they do no good work that I know of;
never saw wood, grind corn, cook, feed the hungry, or go to the help
of poor anxious mothers at the bedsides of their sick children. I
noticed when I was a boy that it was not the strongest characters who
followed so-called mediums. When a rapping-storm was at its height in
Wisconsin, one of our neighbors, an old Scotchman, remarked, "Thay
puir silly medium-bodies may gang to the deil wi' their rappin'
speerits, for they dae nae gude, and I think the deil's their
fayther."

Although in the spring of 1849 there was no other settler within a
radius of four miles of our Fountain Lake farm, in three or four years
almost every quarter-section of government land was taken up, mostly
by enthusiastic homeseekers from Great Britain, with only here and
there Yankee families from adjacent states, who had come drifting
indefinitely westward in covered wagons, seeking their fortunes like
winged seeds; all alike striking root and gripping the glacial drift
soil as naturally as oak and hickory trees; happy and hopeful,
establishing homes and making wider and wider fields in the hospitable
wilderness. The axe and plough were kept very busy; cattle, horses,
sheep, and pigs multiplied; barns and corn-cribs were filled up, and
man and beast were well fed; a schoolhouse was built, which was used
also for a church; and in a very short time the new country began to
look like an old one.

Comparatively few of the first settlers suffered from serious
accidents. One of our neighbors had a finger shot off, and on a
bitter, frosty night had to be taken to a surgeon in Portage, in a
sled drawn by slow, plodding oxen, to have the shattered stump
dressed. Another fell from his wagon and was killed by the wheel
passing over his body. An acre of ground was reserved and fenced for
graves, and soon consumption came to fill it. One of the saddest
instances was that of a Scotch family from Edinburgh, consisting of a
father, son, and daughter, who settled on eighty acres of land within
half a mile of our place. The daughter died of consumption the third
year after th