inley, managed the place summers, with such help in handling
it as the captain had time to give when he passed the farm on his
voyages. It was quite a stock farm, and here I learned something about
the handling of cattle,--and in those days this meant breaking and
working them. It was a hard winter, and there was so much work on the
farm that I got only one month's schooling.

The teacher was a man named Lockwood. He kept telling us that we ought
to read about farming, and study the business by which we expected to
live; and this made a deep impression on me. Lockwood was a real
teacher, and like all such worked without realizing it on stuff more
lasting than steel or stone,--young, soft human beings. I did not see
that there was much to study about as to driving on the canal; and when
I told him that he said that the business of taking care of the horses
and feeding them was something that ought to be closely studied if I
expected to be a farmer. This looked reasonable to me; and I soon got to
be one of those driver boys who were noted for the sleekness and fatness
of their teams, and began getting the habit of studying any task I had
to do. But I was more interested in cattle than anything else, and was
sorry when spring came and we unmoored the old boat and pulled down to
Albany for a cargo west. This summer was like the last, except that I
was now a skilled driver, larger, stronger, and more confident
than before.

I used to ask leave to go on ahead on some fast boat when we drew near
to the Sproule farm, so I could spend a day or two at farm work, see the
family, and better than this, I am afraid--for they were pretty good to
me--look the cattle over, pet and feed the calves, colts and lambs,
count the little pigs and generally enjoy myself. On these packet boats,
too, I could talk with travelers, and try to strike the trail of
John Rucker.

I had one never-failing subject of conversation with the Sproules and
all my other acquaintances--how to find my mother. We went over the
whole matter a thousand times. I had no post-office address, and my
mother had depended on Rucker's getting Captain Sproule's address at
Syracuse--which of course he had never meant to do--and had not asked me
to inquire at any place for mail. I wrote letters to her at Buffalo as
she had asked me to do in her letter, but they were returned unclaimed.
It was plain that Rucker meant to give me the slip, and had done so. He
could be relied up