st every year until very old, probably far more than a century,
while the tops, which would naturally have become tall broad-headed
trees, were only mere sprouts seldom more than two years old. Thus the
ground was kept open like a prairie, with only five or six trees to
the acre, which had escaped the fire by having the good fortune to
grow on a bare spot at the door of a fox or badger den, or between
straggling grass-tufts wide apart on the poorest sandy soil.

The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies
produced so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree
could live on it. Had there been no fires, these fine prairies, so
marked a feature of the country, would have been covered by the
heaviest forests. As soon as the oak openings in our neighborhood were
settled, and the farmers had prevented running grass-fires, the grubs
grew up into trees and formed tall thickets so dense that it was
difficult to walk through them and every trace of the sunny "openings"
vanished.

[Illustration: THE HICKORY HILL HOUSE, BUILT IN 1857]

We called our second farm Hickory Hill, from its many fine hickory
trees and the long gentle slope leading up to it. Compared with
Fountain Lake farm it lay high and dry. The land was better, but it
had no living water, no spring or stream or meadow or lake. A well
ninety feet deep had to be dug, all except the first ten feet or so in
fine-grained sandstone. When the sandstone was struck, my father, on
the advice of a man who had worked in mines, tried to blast the rock;
but from lack of skill the blasting went on very slowly, and father
decided to have me do all the work with mason's chisels, a long, hard
job, with a good deal of danger in it. I had to sit cramped in a space
about three feet in diameter, and wearily chip, chip, with heavy
hammer and chisels from early morning until dark, day after day, for
weeks and months. In the morning, father and David lowered me in a
wooden bucket by a windlass, hauled up what chips were left from the
night before, then went away to the farm work and left me until noon,
when they hoisted me out for dinner. After dinner I was promptly
lowered again, the forenoon's accumulation of chips hoisted out of
the way, and I was left until night.

One morning, after the dreary bore was about eighty feet deep, my life
was all but lost in deadly choke-damp,--carbonic acid gas that had
settled at the bottom during the night. Instead of c