as a millwright had called
him, and it was thought best to have us go out to be with him. We came
in a wagon drawn by a team of spirited horses. We came over the thousand
miles between New York and Wisconsin, fording unfamiliar rivers,
stopping in strange cities, through prairie and forest, with only rough
wild roads at best, never doubting our ability to find our father at our
journey's end and perhaps because of that unquestioning faith, we did
find him. What a journey to remember. We camped in Chicago when it was
no larger than Faribault is now, on the spot near the Lake front where
the Congress Hotel now houses the most exclusive of Chicago's mob of
humanity. Milwaukee as we passed through it was a tiny hamlet.

When I went to visit my brother who had taken the farm on the east shore
of Cannon Lake, I made the trip to Hastings in a boat, and from there in
a wagon. As we were driving along, I saw coming towards us, three
figures which instinct told me were Indians. On coming nearer, I saw
each of them had scalps dripping with blood, hanging to his belt. They
reassured me by telling me they were only Indian scalps.

Mr. Berry, afterward a Judge on the Supreme Bench, started out on foot
from Janesville, Wisconsin with Mr. Batchelder and after prospecting
around and visiting St. Paul, Shakopee, Mankato, Cannon Falls and
Zumbrota, they finally walked in here. Fifty years afterwards Mr.
Batchelder went out to Cannon Lake and walked into town over the same
road that he had come over as a young man, and he said that while, of
course, the buildings had changed things somewhat, on the whole it
looked surprisingly as it had the first time he passed over it. Mr.
Berry and Mr. Batchelder opened a law office in a little one story frame
building in the back of which they slept. While coming into town, they
had met O. F. Perkins, who had opened a law office, and business not
being very brisk, he had turned a rather unskillful hand to raising
potatoes. At $2.50 a bushel he managed to do well enough and eked out
his scanty income from the law. It was while he was carrying the
potatoes to plant that he met Mr. Berry and Mr. Batchelder and having
become friends, they all, together with Mr. Randall and Mr. Perkins'
brother, started bachelor's hall back of Mr. Perkins' office, where they
took turns cooking and washing dishes. I have heard Mr. Batchelder say
that "hasty pudding" or what we call corn meal mush, was his specialty
and I bel