ly trying to teach her to go
reasonably steady in rope harness. She was the first hog that father
bought to stock the farm, and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful
beast. In a few weeks she had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer,
funny, animal children we had yet seen, none amused us more. They were
so comic in size and shape, in their gait and gestures, their merry
sham fights, and the false alarms they got up for the fun of
scampering back to their mother and begging her in most persuasive
little squeals to lie down and give them a drink.

After her darling short-snouted babies were about a month old, she
took them out to the woods and gradually roamed farther and farther
from the shanty in search of acorns and roots. One afternoon we heard
a rifle-shot, a very noticeable thing, as we had no near neighbors, as
yet. We thought it must have been fired by an Indian on the trail that
followed the right bank of the Fox River between Portage and
Packwaukee Lake and passed our shanty at a distance of about three
quarters of a mile. Just a few minutes after that shot was heard,
along came the poor mother rushing up to the shanty for protection,
with her pigs, all out of breath and terror-stricken. One of them was
missing, and we supposed of course that an Indian had shot it for
food. Next day, I discovered a blood-puddle where the Indian trail
crossed the outlet of our lake. One of father's hired men told us that
the Indians thought nothing of levying this sort of blackmail whenever
they were hungry. The solemn awe and fear in the eyes of that old
mother and those little pigs I never can forget; it was as
unmistakable and deadly a fear as I ever saw expressed by any human
eye, and corroborates in no uncertain way the oneness of all of us.

III

LIFE ON A WISCONSIN FARM

Humanity in Oxen--Jack, the Pony--Learning to Ride--Nob and
Nell--Snakes--Mosquitoes and their Kin--Fish and
Fishing--Considering the Lilies--Learning to Swim--A Narrow
Escape from Drowning and a Victory--Accidents to Animals.

Coming direct from school in Scotland while we were still hopefully
ignorant and far from tame,--notwithstanding the unnatural profusion
of teaching and thrashing lavished upon us,--getting acquainted with
the animals about us was a never-failing source of wonder and delight.
At first my father, like nearly all the backwoods settlers, bought a
yoke of oxen to do the farm work, and as field after field