arly all subjects. He was also postmaster, and a
wash-stand drawer served as post office. It cost twenty-five cents in
those times to pass a letter between Wisconsin and the East. Postage did
not have to be prepaid, and I have known my father to go several days
before he could raise the requisite cash to redeem a letter which he had
heard awaited him in the wash-stand drawer, for Uncle Ben was not
allowed to accept farm produce or even bank script for postage.

An Englishman named Pease, who lived near us, had "wheels." He thought
the Free Masons and the women were in league to end his life. Every
night he ranged his gun and farm tools beside his bed, to help ward off
the attack that he constantly expected. Nothing could induce him to eat
any food that a woman had prepared. In changing "work" with my father,
which often occurred, he would bring his own luncheon and eat it by the
fire during mealtime. But after my sister was born, he refused to enter
the house; he told the neighbors that "women were getting too thick up
at Coe's." Pease had nicknames for all the settlers but one, and while
very polite to their faces, he always applied his nicknames in their
absence.

A man named Rugg lost caste with his neighbors because he dug and used a
potato pit in an Indian mound from which he had thrown out a large
number of human bones. Some of the bones were of gigantic size.

There were many good hunters among the settlers; the Smith brothers
scorned to shoot a bird or squirrel except through the head. If there
were sickness in the family of any neighbor, the Smiths saw that
partridges, quail, or pigeons, properly shot, were supplied. Another
Smith was a bee hunter, and a very successful one, too. Those were the
days when the beautiful passenger pigeons at times seemed to fill the
woods and the sky. Deer were very abundant; I have seen them eating hay
with my father's cows; and in the spring and fall seasons the river was
covered with wild ducks and geese.

Two events in my seventh year left a strong impression upon me. The
first was an address by a colored man named Lewis Washington, a runaway
slave, who had a natural gift of oratory and made many speeches in this
state. I was so curious to see a genuine black man that I got too close
to him when he was in the convulsion of putting on his overcoat, and
caught a considerable thump. No harm was done, but he apologized very
earnestly. I have read that his campaigning of the sta