mediately discovered a special
interest in that number, and likely enough forgot to wash myself. When
mother saw this (as of course she very soon did), she turned the paper
upside down, and thereafter accused me, with some justice, of standing
on my head in order to continue my tale. "In fact," she often said, "it
is easier for me to do my errands myself than to get either of you young
ones to move."

The first school which we attended was held in a neighboring farm-house,
and there is very little to tell concerning it, but at seven I began to
go to the public school in Onalaska and memory becomes definite, for the
wide river which came silently out of the unknown north, carrying
endless millions of pine logs, and the clamor of saws in the island
mills, and especially the men walking the rolling logs with pike-poles
in their hands filled me with a wordless joy. To be one of these brave
and graceful "drivers" seemed almost as great an honor as to be a
Captain in the army. Some of the boys of my acquaintance were sons of
these hardy boomsmen, and related wonderful stories of their fathers'
exploits--stories which we gladly believed. We all intended to be
rivermen when we grew up.

The quiet water below the booms harbored enormous fish at that time, and
some of the male citizens who were too lazy to work in the mills got an
easy living by capturing cat-fish, and when in liquor joined the
rivermen in their drunken frays. My father's tales of the exploits of
some of these redoubtable villains filled my mind with mingled
admiration and terror. No one used the pistol, however, and very few the
knife. Physical strength counted. Foot and fist were the weapons which
ended each contest and no one was actually slain in these meetings of
rival crews.

In the midst of this tumult, surrounded by this coarse, unthinking life,
my Grandmother Garland's home stood, a serene small sanctuary of lofty
womanhood, a temple of New England virtue. From her and from my great
aunt Bridges who lived in St. Louis, I received my first literary
instruction, a partial offset to the vulgar yet heroic influence of the
raftsmen and mill hands.

The school-house, a wooden two story building, occupied an unkempt lot
some distance back from the river and near a group of high sand dunes
which possessed a sinister allurement to me. They had a mysterious
desert quality, a flavor as of camels and Arabs. Once you got over
behind them it seemed as if you were