to be uprooted from the forest, and he was
obliged to toil with unremitting severity. There were times, of course,
when field duties did not press, but never a day came when the necessity
for twelve hours' labor did not exist.

Furthermore, as he grubbed or reaped he remembered the glorious prairies
he had crossed on his exploring trip into Minnesota before the war, and
the oftener he thought of them the more bitterly he resented his
up-tilted, horse-killing fields, and his complaining words sank so deep
into the minds of his sons that for years thereafter they were unable to
look upon any rise of ground as an object to be admired.

It irked him beyond measure to force his reaper along a steep slope, and
he loathed the irregular little patches running up the ravines behind
the timbered knolls, and so at last like many another of his neighbors
he began to look away to the west as a fairer field for conquest. He no
more thought of going east than a liberated eagle dreams of returning to
its narrow cage. He loved to talk of Boston, to boast of its splendor,
but to live there, to earn his bread there, was unthinkable. Beneath the
sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity and his liberation came
unexpectedly.

Sometime in the spring of 1868, a merchant from LaCrosse, a plump man
who brought us candy and was very cordial and condescending, began
negotiations for our farm, and in the discussion of plans which
followed, my conception of the universe expanded. I began to understand
that "Minnesota" was not a bluff but a wide land of romance, a prairie,
peopled with red men, which lay far beyond the big river. And then, one
day, I heard my father read to my mother a paragraph from the county
paper which ran like this, "It is reported that Richard Garland has sold
his farm in Green's Coulee to our popular grocer, Mr. Speer. Mr. Speer
intends to make of it a model dairy farm."

This intention seemed somehow to reflect a ray of glory upon us, though
I fear it did not solace my mother, as she contemplated the loss of home
and kindred. She was not by nature an emigrant,--few women are. She was
content with the pleasant slopes, the kindly neighbors of Green's
Coulee. Furthermore, most of her brothers and sisters still lived just
across the ridge in the valley of the Neshonoc, and the thought of
leaving them for a wild and unknown region was not pleasant.

To my father, on the contrary, change was alluring. Iowa was now the
plac