toiled and sweated and grubbed themselves
into their graves years before their natural dying days, in getting a
living on a quarter-section of land and vaguely trying to get rich,
while bread and raiment might have been serenely won on less than a
fourth of this land, and time gained to get better acquainted with
God.

I was put to the plough at the age of twelve, when my head reached but
little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater
part of the ploughing. It was hard work for so small a boy;
nevertheless, as good ploughing was exacted from me as if I were a
man, and very soon I had to become a good ploughman, or rather
ploughboy. None could draw a straighter furrow. For the first few
years the work was particularly hard on account of the tree-stumps
that had to be dodged. Later the stumps were all dug and chopped out
to make way for the McCormick reaper, and because I proved to be the
best chopper and stump-digger I had nearly all of it to myself. It was
dull, hard work leaning over on my knees all day, chopping out those
tough oak and hickory stumps, deep down below the crowns of the big
roots. Some, though fortunately not many, were two feet or more in
diameter.

And as I was the eldest boy, the greater part of all the other hard
work of the farm quite naturally fell on me. I had to split rails for
long lines of zigzag fences. The trees that were tall enough and
straight enough to afford one or two logs ten feet long were used for
rails, the others, too knotty or cross-grained, were disposed of in
log and cordwood fences. Making rails was hard work and required no
little skill. I used to cut and split a hundred a day from our short,
knotty oak timber, swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore
hands, from early morning to night. Father was not successful as a
rail-splitter. After trying the work with me a day or two, he in
despair left it all to me. I rather liked it, for I was proud of my
skill, and tried to believe that I was as tough as the timber I
mauled, though this and other heavy jobs stopped my growth and earned
for me the title "Runt of the family."

In those early days, long before the great labor-saving machines came
to our help, almost everything connected with wheat-raising abounded
in trying work,--cradling in the long, sweaty dog-days, raking and
binding, stacking, thrashing,--and it often seemed to me that our
fierce, over-industrious way of getting the grain from t