feet, our
trousers rolled to the knee. We hunted plums and picked blackberries and
hazelnuts with very little fear of snakes, and yet we must have always
been on guard. We loved our valley, and while occasionally we yielded to
the lure of "Freedom's star," we were really content with Green's Coulee
and its surrounding hills.

CHAPTER V

The Last Threshing in the Coulee

Life on a Wisconsin farm, even for the women, had its compensations.
There were times when the daily routine of lonely and monotonous
housework gave place to an agreeable bustle, and human intercourse
lightened the toil. In the midst of the slow progress of the fall's
plowing, the gathering of the threshing crew was a most dramatic event
to my mother, as to us, for it not only brought unwonted clamor, it
fetched her brothers William and David and Frank, who owned and ran a
threshing machine, and their coming gave the house an air of festivity
which offset the burden of extra work which fell upon us all.

In those days the grain, after being brought in and stacked around the
barn, was allowed to remain until October or November when all the other
work was finished.

Of course some men got the machine earlier, for all could not thresh at
the same time, and a good part of every man's fall activities consisted
in "changing works" with his neighbors, thus laying up a stock of unpaid
labor against the home job. Day after day, therefore, father or the
hired man shouldered a fork and went to help thresh, and all through the
autumn months, the ceaseless ringing hum and the _bow-ouw, ouw-woo,
boo-oo-oom_ of the great balance wheels on the separator and the deep
bass purr of its cylinder could be heard in every valley like the
droning song of some sullen and gigantic autumnal insect.

I recall with especial clearness the events of that last threshing in
the coulee.--I was eight, my brother was six. For days we had looked
forward to the coming of "the threshers," listening with the greatest
eagerness to father's report of the crew. At last he said, "Well, Belle,
get ready. The machine will be here tomorrow."

All day we hung on the gate, gazing down the road, watching, waiting for
the crew, and even after supper, we stood at the windows still hoping to
hear the rattle of the ponderous separator.

Father explained that the men usually worked all day at one farm and
moved after dark, and we were just starting to "climb the wooden hill"
when we heard